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"Who GrOEs Thebe? 



MEN AND EVENTS. 



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• "SENTINEL." 



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%\t beacon ligljt is qnjnrbtb in smoke i 
%\z irumpijt's uVatx boia is still; 
Wt^i foarba siUnt on \\t l^iU." 

— Scott. 



NEW YORK: 




M DCCC LX VL 



PREFACE. 



This volume is the record of personal recollections, 
or of reminiscence, related to me by those who had 
themselves known or seen or had enjoyed extraordi- 
nary opportunity of information of the persons delin- 
eated. As far as possible, that only has been related 
which is not elsewhere told. 

In its preparation, I have been most conscious into 
what a great division of intellectual labor it was just 
entering, and how many gentlemen there are whose 
range of sight and hearing of the world's worthies 
had been so extensive, as that they positively owed 
their fellow-men the duty of perpetuating their de- 
lightful and copious recollections. 

I have avoided the time immediately past, because 
the vision of character is gentlest through the mist of 



VIII PREFACE. 

time ; and, except in a very few brief words, have 
confined the action of the volume alone to those whose 
record death had sealed. There are illustrious men 
living in our midst to whom abler narrators will bring 
the offering of history. 

William H. Bogart. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Washington — Lafayette, 11 

U. From Hamilton to E. C. Genet, . . . • 53 

III. From Eleazer "Williams to H. R. Storrs, . . 98 

IV, From Erastus Root to John Randolph, . . 151 
V. From Josiah Quincy to Thomas Moore, . . 181 

VI. Edward Everett, 217 

VII. From Daniel Webster to Zachaky Taylor, . 258 



Who Goes There? 




CHAPTER I. 

WASHINGTON LAFAYETTE. 

"^iHERE is, of course, m these pages no 
design of writing any personal memoirs. 
My life has been but one of the milUons, 
without place, or influence, or power, 
who form part of the world's great census. 
It is in the position of an observer of other 
men, and of the events of my times, that 
this narrative is penned ; and if, in the necessity 
of the relation, I am compelled to allude to what 
I have myself seen or known, it is only as of the 
use of words which could not be avoided. I have 
chosen the title of this book as corresponding with 
the signature which, for a long series of years of 
journalism, I used. Sentinel was accidentally 
my nom de plume, and, as once adopted, it was 
always retained, and there are many memories of 
very kind friends associated with it. What is to 
•^ (11) 



12 WHO GOES THERE? 

be written will not always be of individuals known 
to me. In many instances I have studied to 
know by the living witnesses what was by them 
known of great men in whose cycle they had 
lived, and of whose language or actions they 
could relate that which was interesting; and of 
the very great of this earth, who as certainly are the 
very few, nearly all detail is interesting. That was 
a truth long since enunciated by Voltaire, and as 
keenly restated by our own, almost greatest, phi- 
losopher-statesman, John Quincy Adams. It is 
not a word of sentimentalism or affectation when 
the French savans desired to know what were the 
trivial daily habits of the Isaac Newton whose 
grandeur of thought they appreciated. We may, 
by the minute touches of the picture, declare the 
hand of the master. Excepting Lafayette, all the 
great names of the Revolution were in the roll of 
death before I felt interest in history ; or, if others 
lived, they were in the seclusion of their own 
distant homes. Yet those who remembered them 
in their old age, were, although mature men or 
women themselves, active in our circle ; and it 
was to me a pursuit, of which I thought I saw the 
true and great value, to hear their delineation of 
the look, or word, or way of the illustrious, 
especially as they always observed them as illus- 
trious men, and in more or less consciousness that 



WHO GOES THERE f 13 

what they saw or heard from them was of 
value. 

I have assumed increduHty as the best prepara- 
tion for truth in all these conferences with tradi- 
tion, because I knew that as men were in reality 
of high distinction, and as the time between the 
incident narrated of them and that at which we 
hear it is long, so does the imagination add, or the 
memory lose, of precision. The past had no press, 
to see even the most minute occurrence and 
make record of the progress of whatever fixes for 
the hour the public gaze. Hence it is, that all before 
the era of the modern development of journalism 
was left to the precarious accuracy or industry of 
unorganized labor, and the history of kings is about 
as likely to be truthful when Scott's romance 
relates it, as it is in colored annals of those who 
wrote to make a hero, not to record what the mon- 
arch had really said or done. In our day, Macau- 
lay and Motley have insisted upon truth first, and 
hence, touched by their serious hand of verity, 
certain names of men have gone into the first 
rank of ability and worth in public service. I 
recollect hearing Fennimore Cooper lament over 
the utter unreliability of evidence, as applied even 
to occurrences where exactness might seem to 
have been easy ; and said he, " Now, would not 
you suppose that when a newspaper stated that a 



14 WHO GOES THERE? 

ship had sailed on a particular day, that might be 
considered as true ; yet, here in relation to this 
ship, she did not sail till a month after the date 
mentioned." 

All of us have a little imagination, and perhaps 
most of those who know the value of observation 
have it in large degree ; so we like, when we are 
telling of our glimpses at the dramatic pages of 
the world and the world's masters, to give our 
narrative the glitter and grace of gilding and 
drapery. I have believed thus of others, and pos- 
sibly it may be just that which my readers may 
say is foible or defect in my own narratives. 

There is a degree of safety in speaking of the 
dead. I lind that Dr. Sprague said to me, when 
commencing his great book, the Annals of the 
American Pulpit, that he could biographize no 
living man. He waited to see how careers are 
closed. We are taught what to say of them, and 
especially what not to say, by the familiar adage 
w^hose Latin words have prevented many a pen 
from writing obituaries in very black ink. Our 
flattery of those whose life we know not to deserve 
it, has made the necrology of this country a kind 
and pleasant fable, and we only do not deceive 
ourselves. We know that the saints and statesmen 
we have delineated do not so deserve canonization 
and statues, as our eulogies have claimed, and we 



WHO GOES THERE? 15 

have sometliing of contempt for the popular rule of 
nothing but praise. And if it be dangerous in the 
case of the dead, to invade thus, how much more 
so in that of the living ! What is said against men in 
political warfare is not considered as a record of ac- 
cusation ; it is only the arrow barbed or poisoned 
for the purpose of the hour, and we think it almost 
bad taste that Mr. Jefferson bound in a volume, 
for his library, the hard things said of him — its 
title-page the one expressive word, Libels ; for we 
know that his fame is at this hour a national prop- 
erty and a national glory. Would even Mr. Jef- 
ferson have taken pleasantly a just analysis of 
his character, shown to him as it really appeared 
to impartial delineation ? I doubt it. He would 
have been far more offended at some error that 
was note'd, than gratified at the good recorded. 
Or, if he would not have been disturbed, it would 
only have been because he was Mr. Jefferson, a 
veri/ great man. This risk we must run if we 
write of living men, and can but hope that some 
after hour of life's retrospect may show them that 
the picture was not intended for a public scandal or 
a caricature. Even the autobiographies of men do 
not expose the truth of character. Every man 
keeps within himself an inner room, of which con- 
science only keeps the key ; and either from 
dread or good taste, that remains the secret cham- 



16 WHO GOES THERE 1 

ber whose history he commits to remorse or 
repentance, asking, most of all, the oblivion of for- 
giveness. 

There is, in our country, one era, the history 
of which is just enough blended with a romantic 
thought to give it perpetual interest. It is that of 
the Revolution, as we all call it, though General 
Washington spoke of it as the affair with Great 
Britain. Old manners and old customs had not 
all faded out ; the ways of the simpler-hearted 
people of the past were in it; its republicanism 
was in all the earnest of a new theory, where it 
was safe to predict almost ideal virtue, and yet it' 
came with us respectfully and respectably, after a 
long lineage of loyalty. Our fathers fought 
stoutly against the Royal Family, whom, but a 
very few years before, they had as vigorously de- 
fended ; and the new portraits of the handsome 
Virginian General, and of the orators and philoso- 
phers of Massachusetts, were in the same house, 
and only in a different room, with those of William 
Pitt, of the Georges and Charlottes and Sophias, 
of Wolfe, of Lady Fanny Murray, of all those 
that, to this hour, one can find in the relics pre- 
served in many a house in Albany. Something 
of stateliness crowned the hour of independence, 
and we did not at once become square and sharp 
and practical. Recollecting that the active men 



WJIO GOES THERE f 17 

of the Revolution were those whose birth-date was 
in the early or the middle of the last century, it is 
not at all strange that they made their old memo- 
ries the tinge of coloring to all their new and 
more vivid acting; and they retained, in the period 
to which the memory of men living a few years 
since connected us, something of the dramatic, 
something clothed in the equipage of the times 
when colonies considered themselves as children 
of the British empire, and not as its vassals. We 
need, sometimes, to think of this, to make real to 
ourselves the great fact of our history, — that our 
-Revolution was not an easy choice of a new 
theory of government, but the greatest of sacri- 
fices, the separation from all the home and heart 
associations of centuries. 

Of cotirse, of all the names of our history, and 
especially of the formation of that history, the 
centre, and none near him, is that of Washington. 
It is quite likely we do persist in looking at him in 
a glorious haze, and refuse to see shadows that 
existed. Carlyle recently told an American that 
he^ even he, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, intended " to 
take down that land-surveyor." We can all smile 
at this, as we can at any attempt to make any 
fracture or even abrasion of our statue. There he 
is, as pure as he was powerful, and calumny dies 
before him. We have — all of us have, differ on 



18 WEO GOES THERE? 

what else we may — a settled satisfaction about 
Washington. He is not the man concerning 
whom we lie awake in fear that some discovered 
letter, some unfolded archive, some sudden wit- 
ness shall reverse the judgment of the age. There 
is no Simanca whose old manuscripts have re- 
served, in faithful keeping, unwelcome truths. 
Soldier and statesman and gentleman, we are will- 
ing to let the coldest critic mouse around Mount 
Vernon. Sis grandeur is of the things time and 
truth have agreed shall be permanent. 

I have sought every opportunity to converse 
with men who knew General Washington. Of 
course it could only be of the very few living in 
my day that it could be said that they had per- 
sonally known him, especially in anything like 
lengthened conversation. In the testimony of all, 
perhaps that which made deepest impression was 
the dignity of the man. This they all said of him, 
and this testimony could not have been thus uni- 
versal but as a reflection of the truth. 

And, beginning these personal and derived 
reminiscences with this illustrious name, let it be 
understood that I relate only what I have seen or 
heard, keeping clear, if I can, of what is already 
of record, though aware that, in some cases, what 
was stated to me may have been previously told to 
others. My chief regret is, that in more instances 



WHO GOES THERE? 19 

I did not fully appreciate the value of the men I 
met, — the events I witnessed. 

It is not strange that the personal appearance 
of Washington was that which was best remem- 
bered ; for it is the first and strongest impression ; 
indeed, it is about all that the mere observer had 
opportunity to know. I have said that there was 
a universal testimony to his grandeur of mien and 
carriage, — yet that must be modified ; for one of 
the most distinguished of all whose conversation re- 
specting Washington! heard, — Josiali Quincy, — 
said he did not think him as majestic as reported, 
but spoke in special admiration of Gouverneur Mor- 
ris's elegance, — a remark coming from him which 
gives additional interest to that memorandum in 
Mr. Morris's diary, which asserts that he stood to 
Houdon for the body of that statue which is every- 
where considered as the vraisemhlance of Wash- 
ington. Mr. Everett did not believe this, and 
Judge Marshall's declaration of the entire fidelity 
of the statue strengthens this disbelief; yet, as both 
Washington and Morris were elegant men, it may be 
near the verity. John Van Zandt, himself a quaint 
and precise representative of the old business-man, 
suited to old ways, to the easy and limited life of 
other years, had very distinct recollection of see- 
ing the General, or, as he then was, the President, 
riding in great state, as it would now be called, — 



20 WHO GOES THERE? 

his coach with six horses, himself dressed in drab, 
and the object of universal attention, — Mr. Van 
Zandt, remembering the very natural occurrence 
that he left a store in Broadway, New York, where 
he was at the moment, to run down the street the 
better to see him. He said the President did not 
bow to the people, but remained erect and stern. 
This is not quite in our idea of his courtesy, though 
his was not excessive manner, and it may well be 
that at the moment when Mr. Van Zandt saw him 
he was fatigued. When the Prince of Wales came 
up the streets of Hamilton, G. W., while the crowd 
cheered all around him, he did not at the time ac- 
knowledge it. I watched him closely, and thought 
it out of good manners, but, afterward, justly re- 
flected that he must be greatly wearied even in the 
profusion of hospitality ; and the seeming discourt- 
esy of Washington may have been thus occasioned. 
Mr. Van Zandt saw and talked accurately, and 
was not likely to be imaginative in his recollec- 
tions. 

Philip Church, of Alleghany, a high-bred gentle- 
man of great culture, graced the annals of Western 
New York by his residence there. In very early 
life, he was, through his kindred to General Schuy- 
ler, an officer under Alexander Hamilton in the 
quasi war with France, at the close of the last cen- 
tury, — a war which the Federalists called the Pro- 



WHO GOES THERE ^ 21 

visonal war, and the Democrats " the Provision-eat- 
ing war," but which we, removed from their partisan 
disputes, can see was a brave testimony to all the 
world, that young as was our nation it would dare 
all fori;he right ; and, better than that, that we saw 
the hideous, the Satanic character of the French 
Revolution. He spoke in glowing language about 
Washington, declaring him the most dignified and 
inspiring man he ever met, and related the strength 
of Hamilton's admiration for him, — that to him, 
Alexander Hamilton, one of the impressive and 
sublime features of his character was that he gov- 
erned himself by his impartial judgment of what 
w^as right even against friendship and prejudice. 
Hamilton urged upon Mr. Church to recollect above 
all thino;s in his intercourse with the General to be 
punctual ; that virtue being, if possible, in excess 
with him, and its infraction being a cause of tem- 
porary alienation even between Washington and 
his very right hand, — Hamilton himself. 

Dr. John Miller, of Truxton, dined at the table of 
President Adams with him, taken there by Dr. 
Rush, of whom he was a student. He was dressed 
then in gray, — an example for the encouragement 
of domestic manufactures ; and the impression on 
the memory of the doctor was equally correct of 
the stately gentleman. 

And, indeed, this characteristic derives additional 



22 WHO GOES THERE f 

proof from the very exceptions. Mr. Verplanck 
says of events, — not from personal knowledge, but 
from sources which none knew better than himself 
how to appreciate, — that when Washington visited 
the Lakes, in company with James Fairlie and 
General Knox, he seemed to them to lay aside his 
gravity and to enter into the abandon of the mo- 
ment, even leaning back in his seat and laughing, 
to the surprise of Knox ; and it will be remembered 
that Knox was his hfe-long intimate. 

Old Dr. Morse, of Watertown, near Boston, told 
me that he remembered that in the procession, at 
th9 reception of General Washington at that city, 
they were kept in the common for an hour, waiting 
the settlement of a question of precedence between 
lawyers and doctors ; but this must have been all 
forgotten by the doctor in his sense of the Gener- 
al's conduct on the occasion, for he considered him 
as the very mirror of courtesy. 

It was long remembered that when Washington 
was on his western journey, — probably on the 
way from Albany to Schenectady, — his own rid- 
ing was so urgent and rapid, that the horsemen 
with him could not keep up with him. 

Albert Gallatin was especially interesting in his 
conversation respecting the Pater Patriae. He 
was a young, enthusiastic foreigner, coming to our 
country with all the theoretical, book ideas of a 



WHO GOES THERE-? 23 

complete republicanism, and viewing men and cir- 
cumstances somewhat sharply, as they were in con- 
sistency with, or in variation from, that standard, 
by which, until it saw with greater sense, Europe 
insisted upon judging the young republic. Men 
read in classical fiction, dignified and disguised by 
the name of history, about what philosophers 
dreamed should be a republic (and which it never 
was), and gave to America all the benefit or criti- 
cism of their dreamings. Mr. Gallatin talked 
delightfully, with a clearness of statement and 
exactness of manner, as if he knew himself that 
what he said was valuable. He met the General 
at a hut in the forest, where a party of officers and 
surveyors were, under the direction of Washington, 
seeking to ascertain what was the most available 
route for a desired road across the mountain. 
Maps were produced and evidence given, the lines 
traced, and the General heard and looked on in 
silence. To Mr. Gallatin's young and quick mind, 
the result of the evidence seemed conclusive, and 
he rather abruptly or inconsiderately exclaimed, 
" Why, General, there can be no difficulty about 
it. That" — naming a particular line — "that 
is the right way for the road." Mr. Gallatin said 
that the officers around him looked at him in sur- 
prise and displeasure, as if the interruption were a 
rude one. But the General only looked up at him, 



24 WEO GOES THERE f 

and then, for about eight minutes (such was Mr. 
Gallatin's precision of relation), continued his si- 
lence, and then said, " Mr. Gallatin, you are right." 
It was something, at the risk of a little infraction 
of the stately order of things, to have heard these 
words from George Washington. 

Either that interview or subsequent knowledge 
of him gave Mr. Gallatin the impression that the 
first President was cold in his affections beyond the 
usual i-eticence even of isolated men ; for he stated 
with earnestness that he believed General Wash- 
ington loved but one person ; and that one was 
Lafayette. 

Mr. Francis Granger said it was traditional in 
the federal capital that one man was found not 
awed by the presence of the great founder of that 
city. While the President was procuring the 
ground for the city which was to be the seat of 
government, he had but little difficulty in obtain- 
ing the necessary releases, except in one instance. 
Mr. James Byrnes was the owner of a lot or tract 
which it was advisable should be included in the 
plan. The general had various conferences with 
Mr. Byrnes, who was especially obstinate, and 
resisted all the reasoning and persuasions of the 
great man. Unused to opposition, Washington 
turned upon him and said, as only he could say it, 
" Mr. James Byrnes ! what would your land 



WHO GOES THERE? 25 

have been worth if I had not placed this city 
on the Potomac ? *' Byrnes was not crushed ; 
but, undismayed, coolly turned to him and said, 
" George Washington, what would you have 
been worth if you had not married the widow 
Custis f " 

Mr. Thomas Handasyde Perkins talked very 
pleasantly about the General. He had visited Mount 
Vernon as the companion, and, in some sense, guar- 
dian of George Washington Lafayette, with whom 
he had come from Paris, to bring him to the safety 
of America out of the Red Sea of revolutionary 
cruelty. Washington received him very kindly, 
and after the evening's conversation, at an early 
hour, proposed retirement, and, taking up a flat 
candlestick, conducted Mr. Perkins to his room. 
" I think," said Mr. Perkins, gayly, " I must be the 
only man now living, who was lighted to bed by 
General Washington." 

It impressed me very strongly, that, in this con- 
versation, Mr. Perkins said that he found the 
streets of Paris, during this bitterness of revolu- 
tionary cruelty, when the Place de Greve had its 
daily victims, more quiet, and, he thought, more 
safe, than even those of New York. 

While going to Boston, to attend the celebration 
of the laying of the top-stone of Bunker Hill 
Monument, I found Harrison Gray Otis at that 



26 WHO GOES THERE? 

most delicious of all hotels, " Warriner's " — the old 
Warriner's. He had come thither, he said, to 
escape the crowd of the festival. He talked about 
seeing Washington at Philadelphia, while in at- 
tendance on the convention that framed the Fed- 
eral Constitution, and he shared the general 
impression of the presence and carriage of this 
superb man ; and Mr. Otis^s testimony, supposing 
it to have been a correct' one, is valuable ; for 
Mr. Otis was a man wdio w^as not disposed pre- 
eminently to value other men. What a brilliant, 
showy, but over-mannered man Mr. Otis seemed, 
as I saw him on that evenino; I William Kent 
once said to me he was a very magician in his 
eloquence. He was in excellent humor this even- 
ing, as most men were around such luxury of 
entertainment as the unequalled Warriner gave. 
Warriner had a genius for his station as a land- 
lord, and a dignity with it. When the citizens of 
Springfield gave a dinner to Lord Ashburton, the 
negotiator of the boundary treaty, it was a superb 
one ; and some days after, one of the leading citi- 
zens of Springfield (George Bliss) requested the 
bill. " I have none," said the host ; " I wanted 
to show Lord Ashburton what Mrs. Warriner 
could do ! " 

My readers will "forgive this parenthesis. In 
tlie train of the really great men of the earth there 



WHO GOES THERE f 27 

travels the variety of collateral incidents and illus- 
trations, even as the mixed multitude went up 
from Egypt with the people ; and General Wash- 
ington is a stately subject, which will bear a little 
side-sketching as a relief. The General was not, 
by all men, eulogized as deeply as the one great, 
universal heart of the nation now abides by him. 
" I am tired," said John Adams, in later life, " of 
hearing the American Revolution attributed to 
one man." 

Washington took no such honor to himself; but 
all other names must find their places beneath his 
own ; how flu' beneath, is of the questions that the 
historian, who writes by all the light of years yet 
in advance, will determine. It is sufficient for us 
to revel, in our day, in the exultation how pure 
and grand a man was the central figure of our 
early history. We might lose all else, but be his- 
torically rich in him. 

It has seemed to me a little curious that, visited 
as he was at Mount Vernon, after his presidency, 
by all varieties of men, there is so little trace, in 
books of travel or reminiscence, of his conversa- 
tion. His deeds, not his words, make his biography. 
Doubtless he was an exceedingly careful man, — • 
more careful in the expression of his opinions than 
was Mrs. Washington. The attacks which press 
and party made — yes, made even on George 



28 WHO GOES THERE? 

Washington — annoyed her, Irritated her greatly. 
They grieved tlie General ; and he, I believe, 
thought that if republics could be thus ungrateful, 
it might be a forerunner of decay. 

Mrs. Washington came in, one cold morning, 
to her parlor. The General was absent. His 
orders were to be economical of the wood, that he 
might impress his neighbors with a sense of the 
value of its preservation in the policy of farming. 
The room was chilled, and she rung vigorously for 
the servant, who came, and she ordered a liberal 
supply of wood for the fire. The servant excused 
the condition of the room in the orders of the 
General. She, after a time, sent again for wood, and 
when the General returned, there was a rousing 
blaze. " I am glad," said he, mildly, as he looked 
at the glittering hearth, " that you have made it 
so comfortable ; but, my dear, we must recollect 
the example of economy we have to show to 
our friends around us." Madame, quickly and 
rather tartly, answered, " If General Washington 
wishes to see how much his example is cared for 
by the people, let him read the opposition newspa- 
pers ! " 

It is possible I may have prejudice against that 
distinguished lady, but it has always seemed to me 
that an analysis of the circumstances of his last 
sickness will show that, if she had risen when he 



^ WHO GOES THERE? 29 

first indicated to her his disturbed breathing, in- 
stead of lying comfortably quiet till morning, Dr. 
Craik might have found a disease more yielding to 
his medicine. Besides, her will seems to me to be 
formed on opposite principles from that of her hus- 
band, and, in the instance to which I refer, seem- 
ingly in contradiction. 

Very carefully the librarian of the Boston Athe- 
n^um preserves in a side room, and quite on upper 
shelves, covered by a grating of a very watchful 
appearance, the books that formed a portion of the 
library of Washington. And there is need of this 
care. Melancholy it is to be compelled to suspect 
that there might come up even these broad stair- 
cases, and in these spacious halls, and in these ele- 
gant apartments, those who would not merely 
treasure up the recollections of this precious col- 
lection, but, advancing from the mental to the 
physical, would carry off something more than a 
memory — a volume or two. Such outrageous 
spoliations have many precedents, and are not 
mythical .alarms only. 

There have been remarkable, perhaps illustrious, 
appropriations of the rare and beautiful. In the Cri- 
mean campaign, the Zouaves declared that they 
" borrowed " what they took. Napoleon taught some 
rare paintings and statuary the road to Paris and 
the Louvre. Marshal Soult was known to have 



30 WTIO GOES THERE 1 

adorned the walls of Lis house bj mastering some 
works of the old masters ; while secretly and with 
covert act and stratagem, the plot to steal the very 
bones of Whitefield, from his tomb beneath the New- 
bui'yport palpit, was almost a success ; and even 
the grave at Mount Vernon was threatened. So 
the AthentEum at Boston did well to institute sfuard 
over these precious books. Caution is advisable 
in relation to that department of mankind, always 
described in the programme of a patriotic proces- 
sion as "• citizens and strangers." 

Of exceeding interest are these volumes, and 
chiefest those associated with his earliest years. 
They illustrate the grave, firm, decent, practical 
boy, the coming man. They show the forming 
purposes of the wise, calm, steadfast, true-hearted 
republican. It was only by a special effort that 
these books were preserved to America. Some 
gentlemen in Boston heard of the extraordinary 
fact that they were about to be purchased for the 
British Museum, and they roused to this peril of a 
national diso-race. 

There was one which I examined, a curious 
book, and which should, by a reprint, be in all our 
libraries. Its title is 

"SHORT DISCOURSES UPON THE WHOLE COM- 
MON PRAYER. Abridged to inform the Judgment 
and excite the Devotion of such as daily use the same." 



WHO GOES THERE? 31 

It was published at the Middle Temple Gate, in 
Fleet Street, 1712, and is commended to the per- 
vading loyalty, on both sides of the water, of that 
day, by its dedication to the most noble and high- 
born Princess Anne of Denmark. It has for us a 
better and a loftier dedication. Upon its cover 
leaves, Washington essayed his skill in chirogra- 
phy ; and it is characteristic of the deference and 
filial respect of his young years, that it is the name 
of his father that he writes there, over and over. 
His father, Augustine, has himself written his own 
name in the title-page, and it is a very indifferent 
and commonplace writing ; utterly different from 
that neat, strong, elaborate signature, which is so 
appropriately that of his illustrious child. The 
boy George experimented largely on his father's 
name ; and this book of common prayer could not 
have gone far astray as long as these leaves re- 
mained. 

The very writing the boy made contained a 
prophecy, of which he did not dream. Yes 

" He builded better than he knew." 

In a bold and handsome inscription, he has written 
August Washington. It was. In his act, the abbre- 
viation of his father's name; but the voice of a 
world's judgment declares it the appellation be- 
lonsfino; to himself. 



32 WHO GOES THERE? 

There is another book, which it is interesting to 
examine. It is a watchword to one of his great 
pages of duty. Its title is, " Inquiry into the Art 
of War;" and it receives its dedication to a man, 
at whose name, less than a hundred years since, 
Boston's very heart called out to mutiny, — John, 
Earl of Bute. It is the compilation of Charles 
De Valiere. Was he kindred to the lovely wo- 
man, who, we are told, did what so few of the 
beautiful of the court of France ever did, — re- 
traced her steps from evil to good ? 

Its opening sentence is a curious one, and one 
which Washington never believed, — 

" Honor is a vague expression." 

There are volumes upon husbandry, which indi- 
cate that the farm at Mount Vernon found the 
brave soldier and the unsullied statesman prepared 
for the arts of peace, as well as for the conflicts of 
camp and cabinet. 

In one of the pages he wrote the name of his 
mother ; and one of his own signatures resembles 
the style of those quaint, complicated, and orna- 
mental deeds of conveyance, which form the curi- 
osities of the pen-Avork of the past. 

We imperfectly estimate the manner and bear- 
ing of Washington by casting it in the mould of 
our own times. Even in the old-world countries, 



WHO GOES THERE? 33 

there is no longer any awful reverence surround- 
ing monarchy itself; and as for the titled, they 
must show something of mind or great opulence, 
or th^y are in danger of being confused with the 
crowd. It has been my judgment, that with 
General Washington, after the cloud of party feel- 
ing had begun to rise and veil somewhat the enthu- 
siastic days of the Revolution and the thoughtful 
ones of the Constitution's creation, the belief in the 
full efficiency of the republic measurably waned. 
Years after Washington died, the greatest man of 
his cabinet, Alexander Hamilton (it was in 1804, 
I think), expressed to Mr. Quincy the belief that 
the republic would not last forty years. (There 
were a few days in the year that marked that pe- 
riod — 1844 — when some of us thought his pre- 
dicting not distant from the actual condition of 
things.) Washington had established in his mind 
the truth, that, to the mass of men, the form in 
which a principle is cast is of as much or more 
weight than the principle itself. He knew, as all 
men who observe the continuous history of man- 
kind know, because the facts of a thousand years of 
civilization force the knowledge on us, that he who 
rules for the greatest good of all must rule strongly 
and rule at a distance. He was little less annoyed 
by the views of some who surrounded Mr. Jeffer- 
son than he had been by the oppressive policy of 



34 - WHO GOES THERE? 

Lord North. Just at that time, France acted in 
a way that made all men regret to find that its 
illumination was but the prelude to a conflagration ; 
that the sword, which had been unsheathed \tith 
the pretence and perhaps the purpose to free men, 
had chiefly emjiloyed itself in murdering them. 

And so Washington became a man of form, of 
personal dignity, of state, not so much in its orna- 
ments, for above all that his soul rose, but in its 
cold, calm isolation. 

We are every day becoming more anxious to 
know which of all portraits and statues of Wash- 
ington is nearest the truth, which best presents to us 
the man as he actually was ; for this, beyond all 
genius of idealization or wasting of coloring, is 
the value of a portraiture, and the worth of a 
genuine original is a very practical affair. Only a 
brief time since, I found the intelligent president 
of the New York Historical Society examining 
authorities at the State Library, respecting the 
verification of a portrait, whose value, if estab- 
lished, was available at thousands of dollars. It 
will be interesting to know Mr. Edward Everett's 
criticism on the justly famous Houdon statue. 
He says, in a letter to me, " Its merits I have 
ever thought very great. I own I think the 
fasces out of proportion to the rest of the work, 
and, considering that Washington was a private 



WEO GOES THERE? 35 

citizen when the statue was modelled (1785), of 
doubtful propriety. The person is stated to have 
been modelled from life ; in that case, Washing- 
ton must have considerably increased at a later 
period, which was no doubt true. Viewed by 
itself, and without the head, owing to the tight 
fit of the clothes, it does not give an idea of the 
traditionary grandeur of Washington's form. In 
other words, precisely the same objection may be 
made to it which is made to Powers' statue of 
Webster." 

Perhaps our own state (New York), in its new 
capitol, will yet place that statue of Washington 
which, made by the most eminent of sculptors, 
shall, avoiding all idealization, and drawing its 
truth from all sources, be, in all respects, the most 
real resemblance that, in marble, can be made of 
man. 

Of Franklin, I found only one man, among 
aged citizens, who had reminiscence of him, 
and that was the delightful Quaker, or Friend, 
Isaac T. Hopper, v/ho seemed to me a man very 
earnest in the fact and very lovely in the manner, 
of doing good. He recollected to have seen 
Franklin in the streets of Philadelphia, and to 
have received a very kind word of salutation and 
encouragement even in this passing street inter- 
view. The last time that he saw him was in a 



36 WHO GOES THEEEf 

sedan chair, on his way to the state-house. It is 
very singular to me that more was not made, by 
historians, of his participation in the great Union 
Albany Convention of 1764, especially by Albany 
annalists ; but I do not recollect of ever having 
heard any reminiscence of it from the old gentle- 
men of that city. It was held, I think, in the old 
court-house, or city hall, which stood at the south- 
east corner of Hudson street and Broadway (then 
Court street, afterward South Market street) ; but 
of the grand old philosopher's action, as a visitor 
to that ancient city, I can find no trace. It is 
easy to suppose that he enjoyed the hospitalities of 
the leading families and official people, because he 
was known already as a man of mark ; but a con- 
vention so important, where such a man was 
a master-spirit, and where crown and colony and 
tribe had representation, deserved a minute chron- 
icle. 

It is an incident, I think, not generally known, 
that, after the war, Franklin proposed to Washing- 
ton that they should visit Europe together. What 
travellers ! To our eyes, looking through history, 
it would seem that it would have been the occa- 
sion for a series of ovations ; yet the men were 
very differently viewed in Europe. To have se- 
cured, each, the highest order of welcome, the one 
should have gone to France, the other to England. 



WHO GOES THERE? 37 

Wisest, the General decided that he could not 
leave his home. 

Mr. Jefferson's life lasted so far into our own time 
that he seems close to us. A man he was of a gran- 
deur of intellect which made him a master of his 
circle wherever he went. Mr. Henry S. Randall, his 
historian, his best historian, and the one in whose 
labors Mr. Jefferson's family have expressed their 
high approbation, told me that his researches did 
not confirm the current idea that there was dis- 
sension between him and Washington ; and this 
'may be so, yet I think it is proved that he be- 
lieved that the General had not the same idea of 
the essential development of repubKcanism which 
he possessed, which his French life had strength- 
ened. What vast suffering to this country might 
have been obviated, if Mr. Jefferson had been at 
home, in the Pliiladelphia constitutional conven- 
tion, instead of in his diplomatic duty ! We 
think of him as a radical. I suspect he was a 
very guarded one. He, by no means, satisfied 
Citizen Genet. He had a manner that was irre- 
sistible. Mr. Verplanck says, that when vVan 
Polanen, the minister from the Netherlands to 
our government in the days of Washington went 
to make his official first call — his presentation — it 
was with great ceremony. The Secretary of State 
arranged and appointed the precise hour, and, at 






38 WHO GOES THERE? 

that exact hour, the awed Netherlander arrived, 
and the folding-doors were opened, and the General 
stood in the centre of the room, an embodiment of 
potential presence ; and this suited Mr. Van Polanen 
and he went away from the interview delighted. 
He could feel like bringing the ancient name of 
the house of Orange before such a man. 

After a successful diplomatic service, he returned 
home, probably delighting the dinner-tables of Am- 
sterdam by his recitals of the grandeur of the great 
American. As he had behaved well, the Nether- 
lands, knowing that great lesson in the conduct of 
human affairs, when they were well served, 
after nine years sent him again to this country. 
Mr. Jefferson was then the President. Remem- 
bering the former etiquette, Mr. Van Polanen ap- 
plied to the Secretary of State, Mr. Madison, as to 
the day and hour when Mr. JeflPerson would be 
pleased to receive him. " I think he will see you 
now," said Mr. Madison to the surprised diplo- 
mat, who expected a future interview. Mr. Mad- 
ison called for a carriage, and went immediately up 
to the- President's house, and without delay or doubt 
presented the minister immediately to Mr. Jeffer- 
son, who, as they entered, was seated near the 
chimney-piece, in a manner especially unstudied. 
Conversation ensued, and Mr. Jefferson's power 
was soon displayed ; for the Hollander, accustomed 



J/a i^JPt/^tt^/tX^e^ 



WHO GOES THERE? 39 

and prepossessed as he was in form and ceremony 
of court, declared as lie left him., that he was "just 
as much pleased as when I saw General Washing- 
ton." 

No ordinary man could have successfully met 
the ordeal of this comparison. But this was in 
Mr. Jefferson, and such is the testimony given me 
by Mr. Hale, the author of a History of the 
United States, who numbered among the most for- 
tunate incidents of his hfe that he made a visit to 
Monticello. 

Mr. Jefferson welcomed him, scarcely noticing 
his letters of introduction, and at once made his 
arrangenients for the day, telling him that he 
claimed an hour and a half for his exercise on 
horseback, and at all other times proposed to be in- 
^ teresting to his guest. He conversed fully, freely, 
^ -| but always as if pronouncing judgment on men 
^ 'S and affairs, formed after mature deliberation, and 
? not admitting of contradiction ; an air and way 
of becoming authority, in him entirely appropriate. 



r< 



^^ "^•. His powers of conversation were especially fasci- 

j^^ ^ ^^ nating to young men. Mr. Clay spoke approvingly 

^-| "^ of Jefferson's conversation, and slightingly concern- 

^ ^^ inaf Madison in that line. 

S "^"^^ Certainly he had that in him which made men 

^' ^ Ni proud of any association with him. A veteran poli- 

^ Vi s*ici^^> John Cramer, said to me, " When I was 







>4. 



40 . WHO GOES THERE? 

twenty -four years of age, I held the proudest office 
I ever held or ever expect to hold, — I was an 
elector for Thomas Jefferson. 

Ex-President Tyler declared him to be the most 
charming talker he ever knew, — that he never dis- 
puted, except with philosophers, but yet always 
gave his opinion as fixed and settled. 

Who can ever forget the profound sensation 
which the news of Mr. Jefferson's death, occurring 
on the 4th of July, 1826, occasioned in the North- 
ern States, when its announcement increased the 
interest and feeling already produced by the sooner 
received tidings that on the same day of festive 
cek^bration John Adams had died ? It was not 
that these distinsiuished men had both left earth on 
the Independence Day, but that they, above all 
men, had been most associated in all our history 
with it. As an event involving great coincidence 
of extraordinary circumstance, it swayed the pub- 
lic mind to a deo-ree which was absorbincr. It 
seemed to canonize the whole affair of the Revolu- 
tion, and it was theme of voice and text of pen for 
the nation : and this feelincr was in deo-ree renewed 
when nine years afterward James Monroe died on 
the same day. 

Mr. Monroe's own name has been obscured in 
the fact which ought to have been considered one 
of the chief claims to most honorable distinction, 



WHO GOES THERE? 41 

that in his day of the chief-magistracy, party 
slejot, and men fraternized, resting from the strug- 
gles of the past, and preparing for the long, long 
contests of the future. Mr. Monroe was a great 
man in the variety of his public service, if not else. 
He had seen every department of trust and honor 
in civil, diplomatic, and military life, and he came 
to the presidency — an eight years' presidency — 
by an easy progression. He seemed to be lost in his 
old age in the crowds of New York ; all we heard 
was that Mr. Gouverneur was postmaster because 
he was of Mr. Monroe's family, and this seemed 
a very proper arrangement. The city realized its 
citizenship of a man so distinguished most when 
the funeral gun sounded to express a nation's 
honor over his grave. And yet a living authority 
says to me, " Monroe was only a good, top-booted 
man, — himself nothing, his cabinet everything." 

Of Lafayette, I can write from personal recol- 
lection. That he was to come at all, that he was 
a living man to come again among us, the Lafay- 
ette of the Revolution, seemed to us, in 1824, of 
the strangest ; for he certainly appeared to us, who 
were as boys to see him, as already in the pan- 
theon of history ; and the idea that we should 
make personal acquaintance with one of the great- 
est of revolutionary names gave to the promise of 
his coming a romantic and unreal interest. All 



42 WHO GOES THERE f 

that I saw of him was at Albany, where we were 
all, old and young, in a delicious excitement about 
it. The pleasantest narrative of his coming to 
New York, of his arrival in this country, is in Mr. 
Cooper's Homeward Bound. We all remembered 
the name of the Cadmus packet ; and that ship 
thenceforward bore a charmed designation. He 
was to come to Albany by the James Kent steam- 
boat, — the best and largest of all the old fleet ; the 
one, I remember, in which it was made a mighty 
effort to accomplish the passage from New York to 
Albany in twelve hours. He was due by the 
early afternoon, and all Albany and all Albany's 
surroundings gathered in high holiday. It must 
be remembered that Lafayette was a very reason- 
able foundation for a vivid romantic feeling. He 
had not come in the decorous respectability of the 
forsaking of farm and warehouse to join the army 
of the revolution, impelled by the desire to win 
out a free government for one's own land ; but he 
had leaped into the field and to the side of Wash- 
ington in a way that would have been rather bril- 
liant in the best days of chivalry. He had come, 
when a boy, from all that could detain a boy at 
home, — come in a journey, which, in this day-, 
it would puzzle us to find any part of the earth so 
far off, — and we expected that day to see that 
boy. It pushed for us, who took that view of the 



WHO GOES THERE ^ 43 

case, the clock of time the half century backward. 
There was need of our enthusiasm. It was wanted 
to give full endowment to our patience. The 
afternoon waned ; and the Point refused to show 
the great pipe quadrate of the Kent darkening 
around it. 

Mr. Morse and Professor Henry about that day 
were bright young men, but not bright enough to 
read the horoscope of their own great discourses. 
No telegraph could relieve us. Not at a very dis- 
tant period from that, the same James Kent did use 
a signal to relieve another great coming of the Al- 
bany people. It was when everybody was anxious 
to know whether Eclipse or Sir Henry, North or 
South, had won the great race ; and when it was 
ao-reed that the Kent should float a white flag if 
our northern horse had triumphed, and the white 
flag was enthusiastically welcomed when it showed 
itself. 

But the crowd that had o^athered to see the rev- 
oluj[;ion come back again, — for so Lafayette's 
coming seemed to be, — though they were faint, 
were not despairing. Windows were thronged ; 
and all the long line of Market street showed an 
anxious people, to whom the event was one that 
fatigue could not thrust aside. At last, as the 
evening drew near, we were relieved by learning 
that he had arrived at Greenbush, where there 



44 WHO GOES THERE 1 

were very good reasons that lie should wait a 
brief season, as there was a tent and a very pleas- 
ant company of Visschers and Van Rensselaers 
and Whitbecks and DeWitts, neighbors of the 
Edmund C. Genet, whose evening hours of life 
were peacefully passed in that neighborhood, and 
who as acutely represented the extreme of the 
French revolutionary period, as did Lafayette its 
conservative side. There was a legend in that 
tent, — " The boy did escape." It was the clever 
thought of William H. DeWitt and of Albany 
thus to make allusion to the incident when Lord 
Cornwallis believed that he had effectually sur- 
rounded the young soldier, and expressed himself 
that the boy could not escape him. And the old 
man looked pleasantly on this remembrance of one 
of the j^erilous passages of his soldier life. 

But while the clever words and abundant cheer 
of the tent at Greenbush kept him from Albany, 
the shadows of the evening darkened. A few of 
the peoples-had gone off despairing, and it seenjed 
as if the keenness of the Albany reception was 
blunted. But when he did cross the ferry, and 
we had him safe on the shore of the old city he 
remembered so well, our fathers made the air vivid 
with their welcome. He was placed safely in the 
Visscher carriage, with the venerable Stephen 
Lush, a man of the Revolution, by his side. I 



WHO GOES THERE ? 45 

have said, *' the Visscher carriage ; " for it seems 
kidicrous to us now, in these days of all the opu- 
lent variety of equipage, that, as late as 1824, it 
was necessary to go over to the ancient house of 
the Visschers to find a suitable carriage for the 
nation's guest. Yet it was so ; and I recollect 
well about the preliminary examination and polish- 
ing it had at the establishment of Mr. Gould ; for 
it was an old vehicle, long put away, and there 
was need of new garniture, and the fishes with 
which it was flecked needed brio;htenino^, and it 
had a long preparation for its honors. Up South 
Market street, amidst improvised illumination and 
beneath green arches, and in the companionship of 
a most enthusiastic crowd, the General came ; and 
yet, in many instances, comparatively unnoticed, 
for his hair (or wig) was dark, and the Mr. Lush 
by his side, with his white locks, received the con- 
centrated gaze ; for who could imagine the Kevolu- 
tion coming back to us but with all the incidents 
of venerable age. This dark-haired man could 
not be Lafayette. We could see faces but imj^er- 
fectly by the partial light, and hence the crowd 
cheered that white head. But Lafayette made all 
the acknowledgments ; for he never forgot his part. 
I stood to see him, just where, in 1860, I stood 
to see a pageant procession, in some respects like 
this, of the entrance of the Prince of Wi 



46 WHO GOES THERE 1 

The latter receiving a kindness which did our na- 
tion so much honor that it evidenced toward the 
reigning family of our old home almost a revival 
of a period precedent to that of the Revolution, — 
the day of loyalty, as that word was understood 
prior to 1776. 

The General was safely sheltered that evening in 
civic hospitality, and we all went home satisfied. 
We had seen Lafayette. Henceforth there was a 
touch of the Revolution about us. The next day, 
we, that is, the juveniles, concluded that it was 
our chief and primary duty to watch and record 
every movement of the illustrious man, and that 
the demands of education upon us might be post- 
.poned. We builded better than we knew. There 
was more real education in the incidents of those 
days than in a hundred pages of written his- 
tory. So, wherever he moved, did we. Just 
where the city flagstaff now is, at the centre 
of the large space at the juiiCtion of State 
street and Broadway, was a pump. It might 
be designated as the town-pump, and was 
worthy of having been the subject of Hawthorne's 
delightful essay. What quaint superstitions at- 
tached themselves to boyish intercourse in that 
day ! Is there yet any of this remaining, or has 
it all died, in our bright and busy practicalism ? 
We were taught to believe that if, by the side of 



WFIO GOES THERE? 47 

that pump, any of us should he down and count 
the stars above us, death would immediately ensue. 
I do not know that we precisely believed this, but 
the experiment was not made. Perhaps Albany 
considered that pump a choice ornament ; at all 
events, in the day of Lafayette's visit, it was made 
the locale of a bold but entirely successful hom- 
age to our guest. Indeed, it was quite in the style 
of some of the incidents that graced Queen Eliza- 
beth's progress at Kenilworth. 

" There's a bo^yer of roses in Bendamere's 
stream," sings Moore, in one of his sweetest songs. 
Not quite of roses, but of verdure very profuse and 
deep, was there a bower formed and woven around 
this pump, and it was indeed a green spot in the 
stony Sahara of the city. Upon its top stood a 
living eagle, the very bird and emblem of our 
nation, — no taxidermist's effigy, but in real life. 
Certainly it was a most successful device, but its 
full triumph was not in the mere look of the thing. 
As Shakspeare, or Sheridan, recommends above 
all things, to the players, action, so was this to be 
conducted. As, the next day, the General, in his 
progress through the city, passed this bower, at 
the very moment of his nearest approach to it, up 
rose the eagle, and, raising his wings, seemed 
about to depart on the glad mission of communi- 
cating the tidings that Lafayette was among us. 



48 WHO GOES THERE? 

And I do not doubt that the General thought it 
a very pretty occurrence, and his suite, a very 
remarkable one, and to the crowd that followed 
his carriage a most curious coincidence, that, at 
that very moment, the eagle should so appropri- 
ately rise ; but for us, — we who had, in some 
way only possible to boys, the confidence of the 
penetralia, — we knew that, at that time, the eagle 
could not help rising, for he was most uncomforta- 
bly pushed thereunto by a dexterous but unre- 
lenting man in the concealment of the bower. 
The w^orld outside did not know it, and it is type 
of too many of the instances where the eagle rises, 
and the showman thrusts, and the crowd shout, 
and history makes grave record, and only the few 
know what it was that really made the great 
occasion. 

We, a great multitude of men, women, and 
children, accompanied him to Troy, whose citizens 
were profuse in their hospitalities. He went up in 
a small packet-boat, on the canal ; and by the side 
of his flotilla, on both banks of the canal, this 
crowd w^ent on, of course, with all the gay and 
hearty incidents of the clever pleasantries of every- 
body's contribution to the general exultation. 
Even now I recollect the ea'se with w^hich the five 
miles were walked ; and it has always been to me 
an explanation of the long marches of armies, for 



PTHO GOES THERE f 49 

tlie labor seems divided among all, and its indi- 
viduality lessened. He was received at the 
Watervliet arsenal, by a salute, that was the 
most interesting incident of the affair, and the 
arrangement of which indicated a taste for the 
dramatic that is not always found in our people. 
The old trophy guns, taken at Yorktown, were 
brought out, and we all came to the arsenal, by 
the side of Lafayette, on the sound of Yorktown's 
cannon. This incident made all fatigue forgot- 
ten. There could be no fictitious enthusiasm 
about this. 

When he left for New York, his carriage, closed, 
went through the length of South Market street 
(Broadway), and the lights of a quick and sudden 
illumination, flashing from door and window, and 
ranged along the roadway in all the devices of the 
moment, showed him how keenly the people of 
Albany grasped every opportunity to do him 
honor. Like a true-hearted gentleman and man 
of infinite tact, as he was, as he always was, he 
insisted on taking the same route again immedi- 
ately, with his carriage open; and the people ap- 
preciated this. At midnight, we saw him on 
board the little black steamboat Bolivar, at the 
foot of Lydius street, and Albany felt its page of 
revolutionary gratitude well and wisely written. 

But I have thus far rather delineated his prog- 



50 WHO GOES THERE f 

ress than described the individuaL Whether the 
portrait has grown into my recollections, or that it 
is as I think it, Inman's picture of him, which is 
the ornament of the governor's room in the capi- 
tol, it seems to me a precise likeness. Observhig 
him very closely, and knowing at the time the 
value of such minute observation, his features have 
lingered in memory. He did not seem like a man 
of great presence, but of great amiability, of a 
gentle and rather benevolent and fatherly look ; not 
over mannered, but especially disposed to be cour- 
teous to every one. He had a minute recollection 
of local circumstances. It was thought that he 
had greater tact in self-possession and for ascer- 
taining at the moment by surrounding circum- 
stances what he should remember. This is of itself 
a very rare talent ; but he had more than this. 
He really remembered incidents which were almost 
trivial. He recalled, in passing through North 
Pearl street, a curious knocker on a door. It was 
a brass lion hanging by its hind legs. And in a 
conversation with the mother of Solomon Van 
Rensselaer, — a brave soldier of Wayne's army and 
of Queenston, — he recollected what she had forgot- 
ten, thatj preparing him for the rigors of a winter 
march from Albany to Schenectady ! she had knit 
for him a pair of very long and very comfortable 
Btockmgs. While his tact enabled him to derive 



WHO GOES THERE 1 51 

information that he wished to use, he had these 
pleasant memories copiously. He seemed to un- 
derstand the Americans, — discriminating between 
the practical solidity of our multitudes and the 
spasmodic impulses of the French mob, whose hor- 
rors he had witnessed. It is this that has made 
Lafayette such a favorite in our country, and 
kept him from his proper place in the estimation of 
European historians. 

Annoyed and bored he must have been in the 
endless demands made upon him by all varieties of 
people ; but he took it with amazing patience and 
cleverness. He found, and his coming drew out 
from their retirement, the aged men, — those of 
his own years, who like himself had survived the 
times, and to all of whom his name had been a 
very watchword. They felt his coming like a re- 
newal of their youth ; and he was in continual ad- 
miration at the growth of the country he had 
known but in its struggle. So both parties and 
all parties were very much pleased ; and for once 
in our national life, from president to populace, we 
all agreed. In the pillars of the portico of the 
capitol at Albany there are midway some irons 
inserted, the use of which has often puzzled the 
observer. They supported a temporary balcony, 
which was thronged as he came up the avenue, 
and from which the attemnt was made to drop a 



52 WHO GOES THERE? 

coronal of flowers on his head, — how successfully 
I do not recollect. It was a dangerous experi- 
ment to any hero who wore a wig, but I sup- 
pose all that was thought about. The best of all 
about Lafayette's visit, was the healthy, honest, 
good heart of the people, who, without afiectation 
or sycophancy, remembered that a man really 
great by service to them, — very great by circum- 
stance, — who had been with and of the best and 
greatest of human affairs, was before them, with 
them ; and they said, this is all just right, and w^e 
give our whole heart to it. I never heard him 
utter a w^ord, being only a spectator from some 
vantage ground of post or piazza ; but I recollect 
that I cherished a smile he bestowed when at 
Greenbush, on his way to the Eastern States. 
The incident in itself is trivial, but not so as typing 
the general love of a whole people. 




CHAPTER II. 

FROM HAMILTON TO E. C. GENET. 

LEXANDER HAMILTON'S family 
claim that he was the friend and coun- 
sellor and adviser of Washington to an ex- 
tent and with a daily reliance which the 
public mind is not jet prepared altogether 
to hear. If it is so, it is the greatest of 
praise. Whether it is so in such full extent, is of 
the controversies of history that may perhaps be 
strangely settled by the production of unlooked for 
vouchers in correspondence. As long as I can 
recollect, his was one of the greatest of all the 
names of which in the estimate of the highest men 
in our history we oftenest heard. Mr. Van Buren 
when first in England, mot — for they were then 
living — many of the old men of the government, 
or who had had place in it, and all concurred in 
considering as the greatest man of our country, 
Alexander Hamilton. To that degree of estima- 
tion, party feeling did not allow our people to ad- 
vance ; but there is, as I write, a vague universality 

(53) 



54 WHO GOES THERE? 

of judgment that he saw and could have best pro- 
vided for, all the coming exigences of our nation. 

Talleyrand said that the three greatest minds 
he had ever known were those of Napoleon and 
Fox and Hamilton. My associations were those in 
the sphere of his powers as a lawyer, and these 
seem to have most forcibly impressed those men 
who heard him. Levi Palmer speaks of his extra- 
ordinary powers of satire, so bright and keen. I 
have before me some of his legal memoranda, 
made with the utmost neatness and precision, and 
in exactness of handwritino;. 

" Presumptions. — A grant may be presumed from 
length of time. Doctrine at large in Loft's Reports, p. 576 to 
593. 2 Vesey 621 intimates the same principle. 12 Coke. 
St. John V. Dean of Gloucester, original lease proved, long 
possession proved ; mesne assignnn3nt shall be presumed." 

John Woodworth said that Richard Morrison, 
Abraham Van Vechten, and Chancellor Livings- 
ton were the great lawyers of his memory, but 
that Hamilton was the greatest of men. 

I talked with a gentleman who had most inter- 
esting and complete recollections of him — of 
him, he said, whose utterance was of that 
sweetest and most fascinating eloquence which so 
seldom., so very seldom, is poured from man's lips. 
He was standing close beside him Avhen he (Ham- 
ilton) was about to begin his great effort in the 



WHO GOES THERE? 55 

famous Croswell libel argument, that celebrated 
case of our judicial record. The papers of the 
distinguished counsel had become shghtly disar- 
ranged, and he looked round for a pin to fasten 
them, and my narrator having handed him one, 
the slight courtesy was immediately acknowledged 
by a bow of accustomed grace, — the gratitude of 
the true gentleman for every kindness, never for- 
gotten, although at the instant one of the greatest 
arguments of his life was to be uttered, and his 
hand was shaking in tremulous agitation. 

That dark and bloody man, the Cain of our 
times, who deprived America of Hamilton, lived 
his probation out so long among us, that there are 
living memories of Aaron Burr. He was always 
to me a very remarkable and impressive man. I 
recollect being in a coach with him from Troy to 
Albany, while the eastern section of the Erie 
Canal was in construction, and that I was fasci- 
nated by the pleasant manner in which he talked 
to me, of that which he supposed would, as a boy, 
interest me, and that I was quite pleased with my- 
self that, when he asked me what other large 
canal there was in the world, I could promptly 
give him the answer, — the canal of Languedoc. 
The impression . of his urbanity of manner is in- 
delible. I often saw him, for he lino-ered about 
the courts at Albany, as far as I could see, very 



66 T^'ffO GOES THERE? 

much isolated, and with a sort of neglect, or defi- 
ance, of his fellow-men. In his appearance he 
was just like the portraits of the French worthies 
of the revolutionary period, ^and was quite unlike 
the gentlemen of the time. I noticed him, while 
he was driving a gig through North Pearl Street 
in Albany, in the almost paralyzed stiffiiess with 
which he sat upright. Nobody insulted him, and 
nobody noticed him intensely, but all men ob- 
served him. He attended one of Dr. Beck's 
chemical lectures, in the basement-room of the 
Albany academy, having with him the Misses 
Eden, to whom, I think, he was a guardian in 
chancery, and who quite divided our gaze with 
him, for they wore the upright collar and black 
silk neckerchief which seemed of man's costume. 
He has been described to me, by one who was for 
many years a law student in his office, as a man 
of little originality, but of great and unscrupulous 
power of adaptation of the labors of others ; of un- 
flinching personal courage ; of no conscience, and 
despising or ridiculing the profession of it in other 
men ; of no liberality, except in respect to that 
which ministered directly to self. To old men, he 
was morose ; to young men, bland and msinuating. 
Judge Nelson related to me his having once found 
him writing a letter of condolence to some lady, on 
the death of her relative, and of the manner in 



WHO GOES THERE? 57 

which, when using in it some appropriate text of 
Scripture, he would laugh at his own use of it. 

Yet he must have been a good lawyer. Levi 
Palmer, who was a strong federalist, and therefore 
not prejudiced toward Burr, declares that he kept 
the attention of the audience completely enchained. 
I have heard a lady speak of the manner in which 
Burr talked to her (and she was horrified) of the 
tactics which a lady ought to use to her lover, if 
she wished him to declare himself; how he should 
be driven to it by her apparent reception with 
favor of somebody else's addresses. He was, so 
Joshua Spencer said, very interesting in conversa- 
tion, — very cautious in the expression of opinion 
about the living. 

Burr had a dexterous friend in Matthew L. 
Davis, for no one could have written a more in- 
genious biography — making prominent the kind 
and tender traits which he displayed in his cor- 
respondence with his bright daughter, Theodosia 
Alston ; and while thus showing him in a fair light, 
not shocking the reader by any indiscriminate ex- 
tenuation. It was his best defence ; and yet all the 
biographies, real or invented, cannot make for 
Colonel Burr any higher place in history than that 
of a bad, great man, unnecessarily and obtrusively 
bad. It is well known that his was of the few 
voices in this country that denied to General 



58 WHO GOES THERE 1 

Washington his full plaudit. He remembered that 
when the mission to France was to be filled, the 
General said, " I will not send Colonel Burr ; I 
will send, if you wish it, Colonel Monj*oe." 

But Aaron Burr was not a man for our people. 
His ideas were of self, and that self was to be 
propitiated by whatever, in power or in pleasure, 
ministered to it. Yet, all the while, he had the 
intellectual justice to see the state of affairs as they 
were, and he could not go as far in his individu- 
ah'ty as his will, rather than his judgment, im- 
pelled ; so, I fancy, he lived, in reality, a very un- 
hapj)y life, and was, in all his seeming recklessness, 
a man who was always warring in his own mind, 
and this found unsatisfactory outlet in the sarcasms 
and enmities which he had for others ; and yet he 
bore himself bravely. It is something to with- 
stand a whole people and the popular opinion of 
thirty years of obloquy.' 

I turn to a pleasanter though briefer notice of a 
man who was recognized by vis, not as one of the 
great and master men of the Revolution, but as, 
from his close association with them, entitled to be 
regarded as among the notables of warriors. In- 
deed, that Colonel Richard Varick had been mili- 
tary secretary to Washington was enough to give 
him rank and respect. He deserved all this for 
his own admirable qualities, but his associative posi- 



WHO GOES THERE f 59 

tion was his historical value. I saw what, at the 
time, impressed me as being done after the elegant 
way which we call, — because it is a far-off simile, 
and cannot be closely sifted, — the manner of the 
old school. (I heard a bright voice once express 
the wish that that school might be reopened.) It 
was election day in the city of New York ; and, 
attending school there, I went, as of the sights of 
the day, to the First Ward poll. It was the First 
Ward when, as yet, dwellings had not left the 
lower part of Broadway. Colonel Varick, a fine, 
tail old gentleman, entered the hustings to give his 
vote. Immediately, as he came in, the three in- 
spectors rose and remained standing. He, at the 
threshold, took off his hat and advanced, and, with 
all the grace of a courteous offering and reception, 
of the ballot, he voted. It w^as a pleasant scene, 
and might have reconciled me to some other rem- 
iniscences which have occasionally attached them- 
selves to this department of action. 

Mr. Varick, like General Gates and General 
Knox, lived comfortable, after-revolutionary lives. 
The latter was a citizen of Boston : and his portly 
form and his soldier ways were of the remarked 
and remarkable in society till 1806. General 
Gates was used by Colonel Burr, when he wanted 
to compose a ticket for the House of Assembly, 
which 3 by its personnel, should command a sue- 



60^ WHO GOES THERE f 

cessful suffrage ; and lie showed his accuracy of 
judgment. The voters of New York could not 
resist so much respectability. Who could vote 
against Horatio Gates and George Clinton and 
Brockholst Livingston and John Broome ? If a 
parenthesis of political incident may be produced 
here, one would like to know how these dignities 
behaved themselves under Colonel Burr's lead, 
while such a superb intellect as that of Elisha Wil- 
liams was also there. 

Before leaving that period of our history, — its 
most interesting, but of which the truth, by con- 
versational tradition, was only seen by glimpses ; 
for, like most other observers, I realized the value 
of history only as the witnesses were in the decay 
of advanced age, — before reluctantly leaving 
these shadows, there is a name, in relation to which 
I coveted to know more, much more ; for I am 
strengthened by all examination in the belief that 
he was of the greatest of men in that department 
of action to which he gave — indeed, without fig- 
ure it may be said — all his soul. I refer to 
George Whitefield, — of all men, since the day of 
Paul, the most earnest and powerful in the utter- 
ance of the gospel. With him, the voice of the 
gospel was in such human power as it seldom finds 
given to it. His likeness, or portrait, is before me. 
A face, not of itself of dignity or of beauty ; but 



WHO GOS TEREREf 61 

/ 

the record of thousands on thousands of witnesses 
leaves not a doubt as to his resistless power. Here 
he is, with uplifted hand, rotund face, the defect in 
his eye plainly visible, his name inscribed beneath, 
and its only appendage, his college degree of A. B-. 
Though in this life they did not understand each 
other, and probably felt the pressure of circum- 
stances in severance, yet of them both, well may 
Pembroke College be proud to write in her list 
such names as Samuel Johnson and George 
Whitefield. I allude to this portrait, for it was 
his own gift to a clergyman he greatly loved, aj.id 
it is treasured as a valuable association. Of course, 
it must have been to him an acceptable likeness, 
or he would not have brought it to this country 
with him, or selected it. 

I could trace abundant tradition of the uprising 
of the people wherever he went. It was well re- 
membered by some that they had been told of 
churches so crowded that ladders were put up on 
the outside that there might be auditors at the 
windows, even at this inconvenience ; and to the 
crowds that awaited him, there seemed to be uni- 
versal testimony. 

As he died as early as 17T4, the living witnesses 
of his career were very few ; yet the Reverend 
Doctor Sprague of Albany, who had a delightful 
letter from Dr. Sewell of Maine about him, went 



62 WHO GOES THERE ^ 

with me to see an old lady, Mrs. Johnson, 
^yllo then resided on Arbor Hill, in that city. 
She entered the room, like an ideal old person, 
leaning upon her cane. She well remembered 
hearing Mr. Whitefield. It was at Mr. Eliot's 
church, at the North End, Boston. He preached 
at dawn, just at daybreak, for the convenience of 
the working-classes. He had a very powerful, a 
vast voice, and it filled the whole building. She 
said it sounded like thunder. The church was 
crowded ; and the discourse interested her very 
much, child as she was. It was a great event for 
her to go, and she was prepared for it the night 
before. This recollection survived a great number 
of years, and the impression must have been very 
strong. Mrs. Moore remembered, that, in New 
York, he once preached in a ropewalk, a curi- 
ously shaped place for a great crowd's gathering. 
In Boston, he preached also on the common, and 
his text was that beautifid wish of the psalmist, to 
possess the wings of a dove in its flight into rest. 
How beautiful must have been his utterances on 
such a theme ! 

There is an almost flippant, or, to use a milder 
term, a superficial, idea prevalent in some circles of 
opinion, that Whitefield, though a forcible one, was 
yet, a ranter, — extravagance of speech his char- 
acteristic, however well done. A distinguished 



WHO GOES THERE f 63 

man, whose life was commencing just as White- 
field's closed, expressed to me the judgment that 
Whitefield so greatly interested the people, be- 
cause, in America, we had but little else to fill the 
desire for excitement. That was a very cold opin- 
ion, and I think I could trace its bias. But this 
thought is not just to the orator. Bishop White 
said Whitefield was the finest reader of the liturgy 
he ever heard ; and the testimony of his biographer 
is, that he was a man of dignity and of elegance. 
Franklin, who labors to show that he did not share 
m his religious views, gives witness to his greatness. 
It is time that his place in history was acknowl- 
edged to be among the most wonderful of men. 
He took the weapons of this world and made them 
brilliant in the armory of the faith. 

Of private men of the revolutionary period, — 
quaint, remarkable, interesting men, — the material 
is abundant ; but it would make this work too much 
a local chronicle of the old city of Albany, were 
these materials to be used here. They lingered to 
later days, with perhaps more of observation of 
the then time, than action in it. There was an old 
man by the name of Vedder, a great pedestrian, 
who could not sufficiently express his astonishment 
that he had lived to see Utica — which to him was 
old Fort Schuyler — with lamps in its streets I 
This he said over and over again. There were the 



a WHO GOES THERE? 

men who had been traders in tlie fai North and 
West, leading the most adventurous of lives, 
treading Indian paths, and identified with Indian 
habits ; witnesses of the successive intrigues of 
French and Enghsh, of colonial and state efforts, 
to use temporarily the alliance of the tribes, reck- 
less whether the alliance was sooner or later fatal 
to the Indian ; for his destruction, they saw, was 
but a question of time. If I depart from the strict 
rule of this book for one instance only, to make 
a personal allusion, it is to say that the Indians 
gave to my father the name of Fairweather. I 
trust it was for an unvarying sunshine of dispo- 
sition. One of these traders, Wilhelmus Ryck- 
man, — straight and tall, — used to stride through 
the streets as if he came out of an old picture, and 
as if nothing of to-day attached to him. I met 
only one person who recollected the celebrated 
Aunt Schuyler, so admirably biographized by Mrs. 
Grant of Laggan (the lady, Scott said was so 
"blue" as to be "cerulean"). This reminiscent 
was a charming lady, herself very aged, who lived 
at the very house of the scenes of that biography, 
and she only recollected the great and unwieldy 
size of Madame. 

There is a curious and impressive incident about 
the burial-place of Madame, which is near her 
house, and it could be easily understood how it 
confirms and illustrates history. 



WHO GOES THERE? 65 

For a long period before the Revolution, and 
before its conflicting opinions disturbed society, 
the family of Mrs. Schuyler, her husband and 
herself, were at once the respected and the author- 
itative centre of society. In this phase of aifairs, 
the husband died, and a monument in the Httle 
enclosure near the house is the record of his name 
and excellence. But she, Madame, was in reality 
far the most important person of the two, as her 
recognized rank in history proves. As the troubles 
of the epoch rose, her sympathies, perhaps against 
her judgment, however moderately expressed, were 
with the old, and not the revolutionary way of 
things, and her death occurred just as the crisis 
was formino;. No monument is raised for her. 
Her grave is by her husband's side, but it has no 
designation, and the explanation must be that the 
popular furore would have made it probable that a 
monument would have been defaced. The reason 
remained during the Revolution, and after those 
seven weary years, new pursuits and new persons 
occupied the attention of kindred, Mrs. Grant's 
book has made for this name a distinguished place 
in literature and in history, so that her annals form 
a bright and interesting chapter in the record of 
New York, but there is her unmarked grave. 

There was an abundance of interesting and 
doubtful reminiscence among those soldiers of the 



66 WHO GOES THERE? 

Revolution wlio survived to great age. A promi- 
nent lawyer, who took active part in that long 
series of ejectment suits which confirmed the titles 
to the land which the State of New York gave her 
soldiers, declared that they required careful scru- 
tiny in their evidence, for meeting before the 
trial, they would agree as to what should be their 
testimony ! and this was not always a safe re- 
liance. 

They retained the habits of the camp, and 
roused up into old soldier ways Avhen they thus en- 
countered each other ; but the lawyers of that day 
soon understood them, and could at last define the 
j3robabilities out of all the conflict of evidence. 

That centenarian clergyman. Dr. Waldo, who 
closed, in 1864, a life begun in 1762, told us of a 
French soldier, one of our allies, wdio with his 
companion was passing one revolutionary day a 
house where a spinning-wheel was in use. He 
listened for some time to the humming monotone, 
and then offered the spinner some money, saying, 
" It is the fashion in my country always to pay for 
the music, but this is very poor music." 

Cashier Van Zandt related to me that he was 
walking on the ramparts of Fort Frederick, State 
street, Albany, on the day of the battle of Sara- 
toga, and heard the sound of the cannonade. He 
asked a soldier about it, and he told him that the 



WHO GOES THERE f 67 

sound followed the course of the river, and the 
wind was north-east. 

The same gentlemen gave me a very intelli- 
gent and probable account of the actual coming 
into Albany of General Burgoyne as a prisoner. 
The popular idea would seem to be that he came 
in surrounded by a body of his own men, fellow- 
prisoners, with much of the pomp and circumstance 
of a martial captivity ; but General Schuyler was 
too much of a gentleman to make a spectacle of a 
distinguished soldier. Mr. Van Zandt with some 
other boys was playing at the wharf at the foot of 
State street, — it was one of the few that Albany 
then possessed, — and word came, in some of those 
ways in which boys hear everything, that Gen- 
eral Burgoyne was coming down Market street. 
And so he ran thither, and saw a few gentlemen 
on horseback, quietly moving southward on their 
way to General Schuyler's house. One of these 
was John Burgoyne, and another, the aide-de- 
camp of his conqueror. 

But at one locality in his progress down the 
street he was interrupted. It was sufficiently 
rude at the time, but we cannot wisely judge in 
peace of the rudeness of war. General Burgoyne 
had made some large declarations of his intentions 
as to Albany, which was the great prize of the 
upward (Admiral Vaughan) movement, and of 



68 WHO GOES THERE? 

his own downward progress ; and, among other 
words, had said he should have " elbow room" at 
Albany. This was remembered. At the corner 
of Hudson and Court (now South Broadway) 
streets, lived a Mrs. Stoffel Lansing, who, as the 
General was passing, shouted out vociferously, 
" Elbow room, elbow room for General Bur- 
goyne ! " thereby winning quite a traditional rep- 
utation. I can imagine that John Burgoyne, as 
a man of sense, must often have smiled in his 
recollection of this incident. 

He was a gentleman ; for, in his place in par- 
liament, he stood up and gratefully acknowledged 
the superb hospitality with which General Schuy- 
ler had entertained him and his suite at his house 
in Albany. So strongly did the reputation of this 
hospitality abide, that, in 1860, when the Prince 
of Wales was passing through Albany, Dr. Ac- 
land, his physician, declared that nothing but his 
imperative duties, in attendance on the Prince, 
withheld him from visiting the mansion where his 
own ancestor had been so kindly and liberally 
treated. I wish I had personal reminiscence of 
the distinguished Schuyler to record ; but strangely, 
though living in the city of his residence, I do not 
recollect to have ever heard him made a subject 
of conversation in any special mention. His 
house I have examined with the utmost interest. 



WEO GOES TEF.ee f 69 

The very vanes that are on the out-builclings are 
quaint, and have a reference to the incidents of 
ruder days. 

There was a gentleman who, in old age, is well 
recollected by me, who had borne, though not a 
conspicuous general, a national part in the Revo- 
lution, and in the northern section of the state, 
had been of large service. This was John Tayler, 
whose name was so prominently associated, in the 
political history of the state, with that of De Witt 
Clinton, — the one as governor, the other as lieu- 
tenant-governor. I recollect seeing a young man 
under the influence (real or assumed) of the nitrous 
oxide gas, when such experiments were fashiona- 
ble, pacing up and down the hall of the academy, 
exclaiming, " Vox Populi^ vox Dei ; De Witt Clin- 
ton and John Tayler ! " I thought, for his side 
of pohtics, he did not seem much out of his way, 
if he was out of his head. Mr. Tayler had acted 
as governor when Governor Tompkins was called 
to the vice-presidency of the United States. 
While he was lieutenant-governor, he, of course, 
presided over the senate, and Mr. Verplanck in- 
forms us that, on one subject, he was permitted, 
by the senate, to take part in the debate, which is 
not, constitutionally, within the province of the 
lieutenant-governor. Whenever there arose ques- 
tions concerning the Indians, which, in various 



70 WHO GOES THERE t 

ways, of law or treaty, were abundant, Governor 
Tayler would, standing, as it were, by the side of 
the senate, rather than in it, give liis views, 
founded upon his long and eventful experience 
among them, and the senate welcomed it as the 
word of most valuable counsel. His life took the 
period from 1742 to 1829, and he had recollections 
of the French war and intimate experiences of the 
Revolution. He was one of the party that found 
Miss McCrea, murdered in the woods, lying dead, 
and observed the tomahawk wound in her breast. 
It will be remembered that this was one of the 
tragedies of the war, and which was the subject 
of severe comment in congress and in parliament. 
He knew the Indian character thoroughly, and 
was, in that, a formidable rival to the Johnsons, 
who, in their life among the Mohawks, presumed 
to rule the Iroquois. 

The wife of one of the Johnsons was in Albany, 
and was more than accused of being a spy on the 
actions of the committee of safety. Mr. Tayler 
moved that she be requested to leave the city. 
" Who will tell her? " said one at the board. Mm- 
self in league with her, " I will," said Mr. Tay- 
ler, with a touch of the old bravery of that Doug- 
lass known as Sir Archibald Bell-the-Cat. He did 
so. He told her she knew where her husband 
was, and he did not. A carriage was sent for her, 



WHO GOES THERE f 71 

and she chose to go to Schenectady. Johnson 
termed this an affront and insult, and did not for- 
give it. He sent men, who were fed and lodged 
in Mr. Tayler's stable, by his colored cook, Chloe, 
who had been a slave of Johnson, and had been 
bought by Mr. Tayler, but who remained all de- 
votion to her first master, with a fidelity like 
that of the clansmen of the Highlands. Mr. Tay- 
ler then lived in a house m North Market street 
(Broadway), near where was the line of defence 
stockades, and through the grounds of which a 
creek (Fox) ran to the Hudson river. These 
men, concealed, were to capture Mr. Tayler. On 
the night -when the seizure was to be made, a 
slave of Major Popham, an old revolutionary 
worthy, shut the bedroom window, and was rep- 
rimanded by Mr. Tayler. " Master will be taken 
alive to-night," said she. He instantly understood 
the warning, and, going to the front window, fired 
his gun. This was an alarm signal quickly com- 
prehended by the people of the city. Jolnison's 
men also heard it, and they took to their batteau 
and moved immediately out of the creek to the 
river, and made their escape. Subsequently it 
was known that Johnson's order to these men was 
to take Tayler where he could be delivered to the 
Mohawk Indians ; a destiny which indicated about 
all that was undesirable. Indeed, this is confirmed 



72 WHO GOES THERE f 

by another Incident. After the war was over, he 
found, at a book-stall, the family Bible of the John- 
son family. He purchased it, for a half-joe, and 
sent it to Sir John Johnson, in Canada, saying, in 
irony, that it was in return for the kindnesses he 
had shown him in the war. Sir John returned 
word that, if he Jiad caught him, he would have 
given him to the Indians ; which indicated that 
Sir John had lost his good manners, with his other 
losses. 

When Burgoyne's army was every hour ex- 
pected, — when so great was the fear of its coming 
that some citizens of Albany left the city and went 
for presumed safety to the hills of Berkshire, — Mr. 
Tayler was out at his country-house, which was a 
few miles north of the city, in the probable route 
of the British army, if it should come as conquer- 
ors. While Mr. and Mrs. Tayler were talking 
about the probable incidents of the march, they 
saw one of their woman slaves dragging a kid to 
the well, and, at the same time, wielding a knife. 
" What are you doing ? " was Mrs. Tayler's in- 
.quiry. Her answer was, " I am going to kill the 
goat and throw it in the well, so as to poison the 
water for the British when they come." " Not 
so," said Mrs. Tayler. " Come in here and help 
me set the table." " You are crazy, mistress," 
the slave exclaimed. Mrs. Tayler told her to put 



WHO GOES THERE f 73 

the silver on tlie table, to put on all the cold meat 
m the house, and prepare the table in its best. 
Mr. Tayler now remonstrated ; but said Mrs, 
Tajler, " When General Burgoyne comes past, he 
will see that this is a gentleman's house, and that 
this meal was prepared for him. He will spare the 
house and all its contents ; while, if we remove 
our things, the house may be burned." 

The Major Popham, referred to in the above 
notice, was a gentleman, for the sake of whose 
revolutionary service, the. State of New York kept 
alive a court of Exchequer, of which he was clerk, 
and whose duties were apparently concentrated in 
that fact. He lived to a great age, and was accus- 
tomed, when about to relate a story, to say to his 
listener, " Young man, if I have told you this 
story before, interrupt me at once. You cannot 
insult me more than by letting me tell you a story 
twice." This was high good breeding, and not 
often imitated. 

I wish I had worthier memories of that really 
remarkable man of the tribes, Red Jacket, than 
that I saw him intoxicated in the street. It was 
his doom, and he fulfilled his weird. Judge Sack- 
ett told me, that when Red Jacket was questioned 
as to his birthplace, he would answer, '' One, two, 
three, four, above John Harris; " by which he in- 



74 WHO GOES THERE 1 

tended to say, " Four miles above the ferry-house 
of John Harris," — a famous pioneer of the Cay- 
uga country. Mr. Sackett, with historic zeal, has 
purchased and owns the ground where this forest 
orator was born ; and it may one day have a mon- 
ument. 

Of General, or Baron, Steuben, while I never 
heard incident, I have before me writing of his 
own, which is interesting ; one, as illustrating his 
peculiar excellence, which was as disciplinarian, a 
great master of the situation in military affairs ; 
and the other, as glimpsing, and that not unpleas- 
antly or unfavorably, into his private life. These 
papers are darkened and faded with age, but they 
show that Steuben put down in the written record 
wdiat he designed, and thus created for himself 
that high order of reputation which is so pecu- 
liarly his own. He drilled and disciplined and 
planned and arranged, at a time w^hen, and in an 
army in which, men came to do a great work for 
their country, with a most miscellaneous idea of 
going to war, every one for himself. 

The first is his detailed statement of the forma- 
tion of troops from those of the States. It will be 
observed, that, like many other distinguished gen- 
tlemen (and ladies), he does not consider correct 
orthography as among the exact sciences. 



WHO GOES THERE 1 75 

" Formation des trois Brigades. 

" Virginie, Marryland, et Pensilvanie pour la compagne 
presente. 

1 Brigade Virginie 730 

Seconde Brigade Virg'e 750 

1 Brigade Marryland 980 

Seconde Brigade Marryland . . . . 1050 

1 Brigade Pennsilvanie ...... 950 

2 Brigade Pennsilvanie 860 

En tout 22 Batil dans I'ordre de battaile." 

The other is a little graj-colored pass-book. 
The adage is, that no man is a hero to his valet 
de chambre. Steuben seems to have been pre- 
pared to be, what was perhaps better, a just and 
correct employer. Veteran and valet have both 
gone into the dust, while the little pass-book re- 
mains to illustrate the private life of a gallant old 
soldier who did his adopted country good service. 

" Louis Wolf est entre dans mon service comme friseur et 
valet de chambre at Philadelphie, le 1 de Fevrier, 1782. 

" Je lui ait promis son entreineur comme valet de chambre 
et une page de dix dollars par mois. Surquoi il a recue a 
compte les sommes suivantes. — 43 dollars. 50 dollars. To- 
tal 93 dollars." 

And to this blended French and English is his 
signature, " Steuben, " not without those cabalis- 
tic flourishes, by which, probably, foreign gentle- 
men mean so much. 

I wish I had known old Donald McDonald bet- 



76 WHO GOES THERE f 

ter : first, because he was, in himself, a rare man, 
a true Caxon, whose shop was a sure place to 
hear something of that quaint talk which, in less 
rapid days than the time in which we now haste 
in all things, was the characteristic of the barber ; 
and next, because he declared that he recollected 
Doctor Johnson, as coming into a shop in London, 
where he was an apprentice ; and it might well 
have been so, for McDonald was a man who knew 
the worth of man. He claimed to have seen Fox,' 
and to have been of the Buff and Blue. The 
habitues at McDonald's were of the best men of 
his vicinage, and they made memorable hours 
there. There might have been interesting Dies 
McDonaldienses written. He said, before he came 
to Albany, Governor Jay bought his wigs from 
London. The last heads he powdered were those 
of the Patroon and a Mr. Penfield, of Ontario 
county. 

I confess pleasant surprise, though nothing about 
it ever came within my observation, at finding, in 
history, that Flora McDonald, whose name is im- 
perishably associated with Prince Charlie, was 
once a resident of our country, and, chased on her 
voyage home by one of our privateers, pleasantly 
remarked that she had been in danger, as 
well for the house of Hanover as for that of 
Stuart. 



WHO GOES THERE? 77 

That was a very curious story, related to me by 
an aged counsellor of New York, whose acquaint- 
ance with the city land titles was very minute, 
that Charles Graham kept a fort, in Garden street, 
for the Pretender, and only surrendered on condi- 
tion that he should have tlie old walls of the fort 
to build a vault in Trinity church-yard. I should 
like to believe it, if I could, for it would be a 
dainty bit of romance to inlay our city map. I 
have not been able else to find record that our 
country was at all stirred by '' the affair of '45," 
except finding an address in which, I think, the 
detested Duke of Cumberland Avas eulogized. 

Probably no one name in all English literature 
is so universally a ceaseless interest with reading 
men in this country as is that of Dr. Johnson. 
We read all of him, or of his associations, with 
delight. Even the minute record of Boswell did 
not satiate the world-wide circle of admirers of 
the man who was the leader of a company of 
intellects, each one of whom has left a name that 
adorns letters. 

Mrs. Piozzi's book was one of the latest addi- 
tions to our history of Dr. Johnson, and because 
of her knowledge of him, it became interesting to 
learn all that we could know of herself. It will 
be seen, by reference to her book, that she had, in 
her extreme old age, a species of absurd sentiment, 



78 WHO GOES THERE f 

or flirtation, for Mr. Conway, an actor, with whom 
she corresponds, and to whom she bequeaths tes- 
timonials of affection. 

When Gilfert had his magnificent company of 
actors at Albany, — a set of men whose equals it 
would be difficult to find in any one gathering of 
that art in America, — he made a brief engage- 
ment for Conway, whos^e master part was that of 
Hamlet. I recollect seeing him, as his service was 
over, going through the street on his way to the 
steamboat, and a conversation occurring about the 
success of his week, which had been quite re- 
munerative. He was tall and very handsome, and 
was considered to have all his capital in his good 
looks, and that his intellectual endowment was a 
very light one. If it had been known that he was 
the pet of the charming Thrale, whose house was 
Johnson's happy home for so many years, Mr. 
Conway would have had our stare to all the extent 
an actor's love of notoriety could have desired. 

The tumult of the French revolution sent to our 
country a large number of refugees, wdio were of 
the royalists, or loyaHsts, to the old government, 
and who fled to save their heads. They came, 
and met the exile with the grace and adaptation 
to circumstances which puts a Frenchman on his 
feet all over the world, and which makes them a 
nation prepared for dominion wherever they go. 



WHO GOES THERE f 79 

These fugitives from the detestable revolutionists 
were, many of them, gentlemen, and made them- 
selves agreeably known among us by their good 
manners. They must have been in a great fear 
of the power they had left behind them, as, in one 
instance known to me, the individual changed his 
name, assumed a new one for his passport, and 
retained the latter in this country, when his de- 
scendants, afterward seeking for the old place and 
name in France, could not find it, but were recog- 
nized so soon as they deciphered their former 
estate. These gentlemen brought with them 
handsome dress and furniture, saving, as well as 
they could, something out of the wreck. Their 
necessities induced them afterward to dispose of 
these, and I could yet readily find a curious escri- 
toire, very richly and elaborately inlaid, which 
was said to have come out of the palace, though it 
is not probable that they who fled from the Tuil- 
leries essayed to save anything but - themselves, 
fortunate if they took their head, in its natural 
position, away with them. They returned, as 
many as could go, when the better " order" pre- 
vailed again, and others faded away, pleasant and 
queer, their hearts in the old home. A number 
of them lived on or near the Hudson and the 
Mohawk rivers, a few miles northward of Albany ; 
and it was the theme of considerable neighborhood 



80 WHO GOES THERE? 

wonder when the child of one of tliem died and 
was hurled in its cradle. Either these old-world 
men, or the people of other old days of war and 
adventure, gave something of legend to this neigh- 
borhood. In the latter part of the last century, a 
family whose characteristic would be that of calm 
good sense, resided in one of the houses near the 
Hudson river, not far from the Aunt Schuyler 
house of Mrs. Grant's history. A variety of 
superstitious stories were rife about the house, and 
when this family went there to reside, it was con- 
fidently told them that they would be disturbed by 
sights and sounds unearthly. 

It held the unenviable reputation of being a 
" haunted house." The family were not moved 
by all these stories. They believed they had no 
other foundation than the imao-ination of their 

o 

superstitious Dutch neighbors, and their possession 
of the premises was undisturbed. I wish to say 
that what follows is supported by testimony which, 
in my knowledge of its entire reliability, is irresist- 
ible, and the explanation is to this hour in mystery. 
One summer moriiing near noon, so that no 
shadow of nio:ht was in the affair to cnye it uncer- 
tainty, the lady of the house with her servant 
was in the house attending to some domestic duty, 
when they, both of them, saw approaching the 
house, an elegantly dressed old gentleman, his 



WHO GOES THERE? 81 

costume old-fasliioned, with short clothes, silver 
knee-buckles, silver shoe-buckles which glittered in 
the sun, hand-ruffles, cocked hat, all quite of the 
distinguished gentleman cast. He seemed coming 
to enter the house, so that the lady told her ser- 
vant to remove some obstruction from the hall. 
Suddenly he disappeared, and they could see noth- 
ing of him, nor could they afterward find any 
trace of him. His coming was right in the way 
where the master of the house was on his route 
from the field. He saw nothing of him. 

The most distinguished of all who came to 
America was that statesman of all times, Talley- 
rand. For a time he boarded at Brooklyn, and I 
have heard Mrs. Cantine, of Ithaca, who was a 
fellow-boarder with him at the house of Madame 
Rosette, speak admiringly of the delightful manner 
in which he read aloud, but generally was dull with 
the ladies, even to falling asleep in their company. 
He was at Albany, and Henry Abel would insist 
upon it that he had seen him walking out with his 
viohn in amusing himself; but I doubt he mistook, 
some less stately refugee for him. He boarded at 
the house of Louis Genay, whose sign, L. Genay, 
was a waif that came down to later times. This 
Mr. Genay (whose descendants have changed the 
spelhng to Genet), was the sexton of the Roman 
Catholic Church in its inception at Albany ; and 



82 ^VHO GOES THERE? 

when the first mass was said at the house of Mrs. 
Cassidy, it is tradition that Talleyrand was among 
those present. The Bishop of Autun ! he might 
have officiated. 

Of Le Ray de Chaumont, so well known in our 
North, and whose name is perpetuated by its asso- 
ciation with Lake Ontario, I only recollect that 
when he travelled to Albany he brought his cook 
with him ; a procedure which, though it showed 
his care for himself, as he came to the hotel of 
Leverett Cruttenden, might be considered as add- 
ing gilding to the refined gold. 

Something of that new First Family of all the 
earth, the Bonapartes, crossed our horizon. The 
annual journeys of Joseph from his beautiful River 
Point palace at Bordentown, to Ballston and Sara- 
toga, were noticed ; and I remember that Hermanns 
Bleecker defended a suit brought by Erastus 
Young, a coach proprietor, against Joseph, for some 
alleged breach of contract in the coaching between 
the Springs and Albany. My sympathies were 
for the exile, as I knew into what hands he had 
fallen in this case. The brother of his brother, 
and ex-king of Spain, I hope was successful. This 
I know that in Mr. Bleecker he had distinguished 
counsel and the best of friends. 

I have talked with some men who were so fortu- 
nate as to see the Napoleon, — the man who made 



WHO GOES THERE? 83 

his own fame and left a capital in excess, which at 
this day governs a great fraction of the world, 
and the celehrity of which does not seem to grow 
old. I call these men who thus saw him fortunate 
indeed, for the curiosity of history in respect to 
him is insatiable, notwithstanding that a Napoleon 
library of memoirs would already fill the house. 
The great reason why mankind is so entranced 
ahout Napoleon is, that he came from the crowd 
upon the old dais of imperial dignity, and had all 
the romance of life about him. He blazed, and 
our eyes are even yet dazzled by the light. I have 
talked with those who saw him in his power, in his 
exile, at his grave, — only to look at him, it is true ; 
but even of this Beranger makes material for song ; 
and one is gratified at some other evidence about 
him as he actually was, than what is found in me- 
moirs and biographies, most of which were written 
to advance some great theory of government. 

Charles King, one of the most agreeable of 
men, saw him at a military review, and he sat, not 
stolid of course, but as banishing all expression 
from his face ; but his horse made some false move- 
ment, and in an instant his look was intensely ani- 
mated and his eye brilliant. Mr. Bayard declared 
his smile the sweetest that could be imagined. 
He saw the grand departure of the guards for 
Austerlitz. It was in all the scenic accompani- 



84 WHO GOES THERE? 

ments of a city's pageantry. It was Mr. Van 
Rensselear's good fortune to see the emperor drive 
into the Tuilleries after the return from Moscow, 
and forty years afterward to see the Napoleon of 
our own day go forth from Paris to the Italian 
campaign. These gentlemen, favored indeed, thus 
caught glimpses of the Emperor in some hours of his 
career of power. Governor King also alluded to 
his handsome face, and his power to banish all ex- 
pression from it. 

I met a quiet, unpretending old man, standing 
by the side of his son, who was a steamboat pilot. 
He had been a British soldier, and his regiment 
was stationed at St. Helena, while the emperor 
was there in exile. He saw him examine and at- 
tend to some plants, and was impressed with the 
sadness of his look. He had planted some flowers 
for him. 

Another, whose father was on the island in the 
service, was just old enough to recollect that the 
object of his admiration and wonder while he saw 
Napoleon buried, was that he was laid out in his 
" cocked hat ! " 

These are all, it may be, trifling recollections ; 
but they are of a man in relation to whose every 
movement the world has turned with an interest to 
know all and everything about him. I can recol- 
lect what great favor was extended, by the popular 



WHO GOES THERE? 85 

opinion in America, to Dr. O'Meara's book, which 
revealed the ill-treatment of the Governor of St. 
Helena toward the emperor, and that the feeling 
in this country was almost in mianimity one of 
sympathy for the great exile. Then, nothing 
seemed less likely than a return of the name of 
Bonaparte to power, except that a lingering hope 
watched the life of the young Duke of Reichstadt. 
When he died, the world's hope for " the family " 
seemed extinguished. 

That we should live to see the name of Napo- 
leon one of the ruling ones of the world was out- 
side even of all the romance of history. I believe 
the peaceable years which followed 1815 had edu- 
cated mankind to the belief that war was an affair 
of the past, and that the European world was to 
go on in the decent dulness of legitimacy. 

Hence, part of the feeling which now gives such 
prestige to the Napoleon HI. is, that his coming to 
power seems to be a chapter of poetical justice. 
The Napoleon was exiled, we all believed, in an 
unjust, unfeeling, and cowardly manner. Such is 
the impulse of the popular opinion, even though 
the truth of justice may, or ought to, soften that 
judgment. To see Napoleon III., by his uncle's 
name, an Emperor, in the grandeur of his power, is 
the romance properly written out again. 

When Louis Napoleon came to New York, it 



86 WHO GOES THERE? 

was to the City Hotel, kept by Mr. Mather. 
Colonel Webb and some friends were dining there. 
Mr. Mather requested permission to bring him 
into the pleasant circle, as a stranger ; and he 
joined them in an evening not likely to be forgot- 
ten. I do not at all believe the stories about any 
low-life associations formed by him while in New 
York. On the contrary, he was select and care- 
ful as to the invitations that he accepted ; and I 
have heard Mr. Raymond say, that he took pains 
to ascertain, when in London, whether the ac- 
counts which were frequently given of his destitu- 
tion in that city were true, and he found that they 
were not ; that he lived pleasantly and respectably, 
and that the chief impression there concerning him 
was that he was slightly insane ; as he, a private gen- 
tleman, in the obscurity of the multitude of London, 
while a great and powerful monarch was apparently 
in complete power on the throne of France, would 
often say, and say it seriously, " When I shall be 
at the head of affairs in France." What could 
sound more like insanity ? And yet he is head 
of affairs imperially in France, and not very much 
removed from being head of affairs in England, also. 
I think there is to-day a much clearer idea of 
what Napoleon really was, than in his own time. 
The world judges best in the distance ; at least, 
such is a maxim in history, and I almost give in 



WHO GOES THERE f 87 

adherence to it. Europe seems to have been sur- 
prised and indignant, that the new man should 
have been so presumptuous as to invade the old 
order of things ; and, in our own country, federal- 
ist and democrat persisted in borrowing English 
and French spectacles, with which to look at him 
and his actions, while they could have seen clearly 
through their own just vision. It was a long 
series of years before we comprehended that Napo- 
leon was not exactly of the French revolution, 
that he was not a partner of the miserable 
wretches, who insulted the name of humanity by 
their actions, but that he was behind all that trag- 
edy, and came on the scene at a later hour. Now, 
we understand all that, and judge of him in a fair 
estimate of all that he really did ; and the univer- 
sal American feeling is that of admiration, not so 
entirely obscuring our senses but that we see he 
was, in its most intense sense, an individualist ; but 
he was so on a scale so grand as that it compels 
the public heart. I have seen attempts to break 
up this enthusiasm ; but it is in vain. A few men 
listen to Dr. Channing ; but the great voice of the 
people is in the Vive Napoleon. I heard the wise 
and venerable Josiah Quincy and his estimable 
relative, Mr. Watterston, discuss as to what would 
be the one name of that age, if it settled into one 
designation ; and, while Mr. Watterston said the 



88 WHO GOES THERE f 

Age of John Howard, the sagacious old man said, 
the Age of Napoleon. 

To this day, without reflecting on consequences, 
I think there is a strata of disappointment, in the 
American mind, that the battle of Waterloo re- 
sulted as it did ; and that, not because of ill feel- 
ing toward England, but because it was out of 
the rules that Napoleon should know what defeat 
was. 

My readers will think that I linger as long in 
and about the day of the Revolution, as if I were 
of the immortal band of pensioners. It is the 
shadowy and romantic era of our history. 
Thenceforth, we get into the broad glow of mod- 
ern realism, and look at men with little belief in 
their quaintness ; while, for any of the men, whose 
lives were, in greatest degree, of the last century, 
we may take all old ways and customs as of the 
texture of their lives. When Timothy Pickering 
was in his last sickness, as he had never been sick 
before, the doctor (it seems to me, with more 
politeness than most doctors show to us) consulted 
him as to what medicine he would take. " Why,'' 
said he, " let me see, the last medicine I took was 
when I was at Yorktown, fifty-five years ago, and 
that was glauber salts. I think that will do." 

Mr. Quincy told me, that, in his younger days, 
nothing was more common in the lesser courts of 



WnO GOES TI1ERE1 89 

Boston than to hear John Hancock's name called 
in default. But he had with that a much pleas- 
anter recollection of him, as having, when a boy, 
dined with him. The Governor sat at a little 
table, apart from his guests. A servant, in enter- 
ing the room, stumbled, and crashing down, came 
glasses and plates from the epergne,^ " O John, 
John," said he, " break as much as you want to, 
but don't make such a noise." And, in this joke, 
he forgot the damage to his china. 

A few years before the Hancock house was 
pulled down, I recollect seeing an old gentleman 
pacing up and down in front of the house, a good 
representative of the name. It looked like the 
historic house then ; and, I must say, that it was 
an amazement to men outside of Boston, that miy 
money consideration was strong enough to prevent 
the city of Boston from retaining, as long as stone 
walls would exist, the Hancock house. Boston 
came down several deo;rees in the general ther- 
mometer when the demolition of that interesting 
mansion was known. I confess, the city has 
looked a little common-place to me since then. 

The old river families of New York had not 
quite lost their caste of influence in my earlier 
recollection. The Van Rensselaer was a popular 
name, as represented to us by the old Patroon, in 
those days a proverb for all that could be supposed 



90 WHO GOES THERE? 

opulent ; and the respected, quiet old gentleman, 
with a variety of carriages, with the old fashion of 
powdered hair, walking at the slow pace of leisure 
through the streets, always with one hand un- 
gloved, and the very solid, fact that his was- a 
domain of estate reaching twelve miles from his 
manor house in all the four ways of the compass, — 
all this made him quite one of the personages of 
the times. It was known that, at his death, the 
grandeur of his estate was to be diminished, and 
we heard vague and undefined relations of all that 
entail had, to that time, done for the estate. 

The Clintons had a representative that acknowl- 
edged no superior. Of him, I shall write in other 
pages. 

The Delanceys, before the Revolution, a very 
powerful family, were not then as well known as 
now, wdien we recognize their worth in the estima- 
ble diocesan of the name. 

The Livingstons, though not relatively in rank 
as before, stoutly, in various ways, maintained 
their ascendancy. Edward Livingston, recently 
so admirably biographized, was the very right- 
hand man of General Jackson, writing for him, in 
1832, a proclamation about the South Carolina 
difficulties, so intensely federal, that I recollect 
hearing Mr. Harmanus Bleecker say, that it was 
more decided in federal doctrine than General 



WHO GOES THERE f 91 

Hamilton would have ventured to utter, and Mr. 
Bleecker thought that figure exhausted all compar- 
ison. Charles L. Livingston, a very able and 
indolent man, was speaker of the assembly, while 
Edward P. Livingston, ponderous and rather dig- 
nified, w^as lieutenant-governor, and presided over 
the senate. So the Livingstons rather sustained 
themselves. 

There was an old colonial family (banished by 
their espousal of the crown side, instead of that of 
the republic), in whose annals of romance the tax- 
payers of New York were interested, and romance 
and taxes do not often touch their velvet and iron 
hands tosjether. 

Frederick Philipse was the owner of a superb 
manor. It had a dainty domain over a rich terri- 
tory, in that part of Westchester county where one 
relic of him yet remains, — the little, quaint weath- 
er-vane which is above the old church of the 
Tarrytown cemetery. Mr. Irving has made all 
that locality memorable, in his charming stories of 
Sleepy Hollow, and he hes in the shadow of the 
old church himself. In that vane the letters F. P. 
are curiously traced. I suppose the manor house 
had all the brilliant associations of colonial hospi- 
tality, especially as it was at just such a distance 
from New York as permitted, even in those days 
and those roads, frequent journeys. And Miss 



92 WHO GOES THERE? 

Mary Phillpse was a young lady who won even tnen 
tlie attention and notice of our own Washington, 
then a handsome young officer in the most loyal 
service of His Majesty George Third. He visited 
at the manor house, and he could not resist the 
fair lady ; but duty called him eastward. He was 
ever a reflecting man, and did not at once declare 
himself, but left, with a chosen friend, a charge to 
keep watch and ward over his venture in this fair 
argosy. He left, I doubt not, reluctantly. De- 
tained at Boston longer than he had hoped, his 
friend wrote to him to warn him that another was 
bold to win the fair Philipse. He could not 
return, and the lady, little conscious what a prize 
she had lost, accepted the proposals of Captain 
Morris. A nation's destiny was in the choice of 
the lovely lady, and we may not now stop to 
reflect what " might have been," which, Whittier 
well says, are of all words the saddest. 

The storm of the Revolution came. The family 
of Philipse and Captain Morris were loyal to the 
crown, and in their great, but perhaps chivalrous, 
error, the lands of the fair manor of Westchester 
went to the new state, and bills of attainder were 
passed, which included the name of Mrs. Morris ; 
very ungallantly, but in the hour of war we do 
not stop for the gentle amenities of life. It is a 
fast and fierce philosophy we study then. 



WHO GOES THERE f 93 

There were broad and valuable lands in the ad- 
jacent county of Putnam, and these, too, went to 
the public title, and the State, in process of time, 
made conveyance to settlers. But, when the fever 
of war is over, nations grow calm and courteous, 
and wish to forget many a fact which, in the strug- 
gle, they flaunted in the face of mankind. The 
State, after all, thought it not wise to continue the 
attainder of the ladies, and it was, so far as Mrs. 
Morris was concerned, removed ; and the shrewd 
and rising John Jacob Astor bought of her her 
title to the Putnam county lands. Mrs. Morris 
lived till 1826, and must often have thought if it 
would not have been wiser for her to have smiled 
very decidedly on that modest, but very good- 
looking, young officer who afterward yielded to 
the charms of the widow Custis. 

Mr. Astor took his title to the courts, and a 
good and strong litigation was had ; and I remem- 
ber to have seen that very impressive looking 
counsellor, Abraham Van Vechten, engaged in the 
trial before the court of errors. Mr. Astor's claim 
was sustained, and then the State, to remunerate 
those who had trusted its deeds, issued a public 
stock, called the Astor stock. It was to the 
amount of several hundreds of thousands of dol- 
lars, and was only finally paid up a very few years 



94 W^O GOES THERE? 

since. So New York was long taxed because, 
Washington was not a quick-worded lover. 

As the manor life of New York has now almost 
entirely passed . into history, what a clever book 
might be made of its annals ! It would be read as 
we read romances, — interested in the incidents, 
and not caring for the exact wisdom of facts that 
are in the dust of time. 

When our authors shall look to their home for 
their incidents, the chronicles of the Hudson will 
be found a source which will furnish the most in- 
teresting materiale for romance, from the hour when 
a few adventurous and brave men raised the Euro- 
pean flag at the mouth of the creek which the 
Norwegian afterward identified with his name. 

Upon the shores of the Hudson lived Mrs. Mont- 
gomery, the long mourning widow of the brave 
and rash and celebrated hero of the Quebec affair 
of revolutionary story. I recollect seeing her in 
Albany about the time of his reinterment, when 
the State of New York, awaking from a long sleep 
on the subject, had his remains, in all succession of 
ceremonial, brought from Quebec, wdiere their first 
battle grave had been, through line of pageantry 
and funeral pomp to New York, where, in front of 
St. Paul's church, the mural tablet is the object that 
amidst the greatest, loudest confusion of life, fixes 
the eye of the stranger ; for all over the world 



WEO GOS THERE? jljj 

there is a strange fascination in the readino- of 
Epitaphs. Its philosophy is that we seek to know 
all we can about the grave in this chapter of ita 
work, even though we know that affection or re- 
spect or something else than the real truth, is the 
virtue of all this monumental literature. 

Mrs. Montgomery was at Albany at this period, 
and what especially impressed her look on my 
memory was her extraordinary small eyes, so like 
those of a Chinese. The pageant at Albany was 
in all the best of pomp that the city could furnish. 
At its head rode Major Birdsall of the regular 
army ; and the next week we were out to see his 
military funeral, — murdered as he had been by 
one of his own soldiers. 

If the rock at Quebec was, at the time he led up 
that most forlorn hope, in the condition in which 
it now is, the attempt then to get into the citadel 
was of all efforts the most mad. That of Wolfe 
seemed an easy affair in comparison with it. 
Montgomery's career and death made a memorable 
page in the annals of the British Parliament, and 
all the great minds of the era were in that debate, 
to extenuate or defend or deplore his course. 

Looking, some years since, over old legislative pa- 
pers of the New York Legislatm^e, I found a copy 
of the will of General Montgomery, which I 
thought was a curious and interesting document. 



.<*6 WHO GOES THERE? 

It used manly, simple, and affectionate language , 
the very words for a true-hearted man and a brave 
soldier to utter. His widow, at a very early period 
after the Revolution, memorialized the Legislature 
for a grant of land ; and the direction given by the 
General's will to his property to Lady Ranelagh, 
was used as one of the reasons for urging the 
grant. 

The committee of the legislature — as is the 
custom with those gentlemen — used very brave 
and glowing language about the hero. I don't 
quite see the grant of land, though we may hope, 
for the credit of our ancestors, that it was given 
promptly. At all events, the State named a coun- 
ty after him, and even these shadows of public 
gratitude are something. There is a peculiar pas- 
sage in the committee's report which gives a light 
on history : " that at the siege of Quebec, hope 
was still entertained of an accommodation with 
Britain." Well may Sir John Russell, in his edit- 
ing of Fox's letters, speak strongly of the fatuity 
that actuated England's counsels in the dispute 
with this country. 

His will gives his property to his sister. Lady 
Ranelagh, saying, " My dear sister's large family 
wants all I can spare. The ample fortune that my 
wife (Janet Livingston Montgomery) will succeed 
to, makes it unnecessary to provide for her in a 



WHO GOES THERE f 97 

manner suitable to her situation in life, and ade 
quate to the warm affection I bear her." And 
the will contains also this soldier- like utterance : 
" Though the hurry of public business and want 
of knowledge of the law may render this instru- 
ment incorrect, yet I believe my intention is plain. 
I hope, tlierefore, no advantage will be taken of 
any inaccuracy." 

I recollect a pleasant old gentleman, Mr. Nick 
olas Van Rensselaer, who had accompanied Mont- 
gomery on the Quebec exj)edition, who survived in 
all the kindly surroundings of a very comfortable 
home at Greenbush, opposite Albany, who had 
the mental and physical activity to go to Boston 
in 1843, when the top-stone of the Bunker Hill 
Monument was laid. It was near his house I met 
Edward C. Genet, who, — at one time appealed 
from Washington to the people, — believing that 
the word Revolution was as potential here as in 
France, and that, as he represented the revolution- 
ary government, the people of America would do 
everything he could ask. His life had been a very 
eventful one in its diplomatic service in Old Rus- 
sia and for New France. I thought him brusque 
and not in the courtly ways of Frenchmen ; but as 
he found fault with me, and he was an old man and 
I a boy, he was probably right. 

7 



CHAPTER III, 



FROM ELEAZER WILLIAMS TO H. R. STORRS. 



WOULD like very much to have believed 
in Eleazer Williams' Dauphinate^ for I 
saw him several times, and it would have 
been a refreshing property in romance to 
have thought him, the coming-up of the 
poor, starved, and abused little regal boy, 
upon whom those hyenas of the French Rev- 
olution lavished their barbarity. But I never had 
it smoothed to. my historical conscience. He cer- 
tainly did look the Bourbon very strikingly. I 
saw him examining the cabinet collection of por- 
trait medals of all the long line of French kings 
and emperors, which Louis Napoleon gave to the 
New York State Library ; and he took olF his 
graceful blue cap, and, placing his, hand on his 
large Bourbon forehead, pointed to the medals of 
the later kings. But the old man did not look like 
a distinguished man, but like a good old Indian 
clergyman, as he was ; and it was a pity to dis- 
turb* his pastoral and pastorate by any wild dreams 
98 



WEO GOES THERE 1 99 

of impossible uprisings into royalty. If Prince de 
Joinville did amuse his and the public's curiosity, 
it was very cruel unless the prince knew some- 
thing more than he has told us ; and I do not be 
lieve that he did. That he might have been a 
natural son of Louis would be an explanation 
which would make resemblance and exile quite 
consistent. 

But he was a better than left or right hand son 
of monarchs. He answered me, when I asked him 
of the locality of his parish, in the old utterance, 
" My parish is the world." It was to me a very 
interesting meeting which 1 had with him and a 
group of old and quaint St. Regis chiefs, in the 
room of Mr. O'Callaghan in the upper story of 
the State Hall, surrounded by all that eminent 
scholar's histories and historical labors ; and when, 
in answer to inquiries these men would give the old, 
old names to the city or locality where we stood, 
and called the Hudson River by a name so* far 
back that our geographers had faint memory of 
it. They were stout and powerful men, but appar- 
ently simple-hearted men of the quiet forest life ; 
and he among them was the superior who directed 
them to higher and happier and holier things. 

Of the elder Adams, I heard, in Boston, inter- 
esting anecdotes ; but I think their general im- 
pression on my mind was that he did not look as 



100 WHO GOES THERE? 

serenely on all around him, in his latter days, as 
did his contemporaries, but was a little cynical in 
expression. He could illustrate a very impressive 
truth in a quiet way. As when a friend from 
Boston coming to see him, while at his own house 
in Quincy, and while there was a controversy ex- 
isting between him and Mr. Pickering, — *' Is it 
not," said he, " a melancholy sight to see Mr. 
Pickering and myself sitting up in our coffins, 
throwing mud at each other ? " I know there are 
Boston people, living at the date when these 
sketches are written, who could give most piquant 
record of the grave and gay sayings of this very 
remarkable man. 

Was he as remarkable a man as was his distin- 
guished son, John Quincy Adams ? I doubt it. 
History will, at a period not very remote, remove 
the political sand from the base of this statue, and 
it will appear in all its grandeur. I saw him on 
two occasions ; and, in both of them, — though 
one was but an ordinary occurrence of life, — I 
was profoundly impressed. I remember well the 
oration which he delivered in the Middle Dutch 
Church, in Nassau street, now the post-office, on 
the occasion of the celebration of the fiftieth anni- 
versary of the adoption, or inauguration, of the 
constitution of the United States. There was, as 
may readily be supposed, a great crowd to enjoy 



WEO GOES THERE? 101 

this voice of history, by one who had been so much 
of, and near to, all of it. The crowd especially 
enjoyed the coming in of Winfield Scott, in all the 
equipage of his full dress, as head of the army. 
That great stature and overlooking proportions 
told admirably on the scenic effect of such an en- 
trance ; and, for a time, the attention of the audi- 
ence was divided between the orator and the sol- 
dier. The discourse Mr. Adams pronounced is of 
the great documents of our history. His manner 
was very earnest and commanded attention. 

The building in which he spoke was, of itself, a 
discourse. It had, and yet has, the great walls 
which our ancestors seemed to liave judged neces- 
sary to bear a burthen, which the more skilful (or 
more hazardous) architects of to-day suspend on a 
quarter of the same thickness. For an American 
building, it had some dignity of age. It was its 
steeple or tower which is memorable as the high 
place to which Dr.. Franklin ascended when occu- 
pied with some electric experiments, on which his 
restless mind was engaged, while he was on his 
way to Albany to attend the memorable Union 
convention of 1754. It had been a chosen and 
favorite house of worship for the old people of 
New York ; and when it died the decent death of 
being found territorially too valuable to be kept for 
the ancient associations and likings of a few peo- 



102 WHO GOES THERE ^ 

pie, the Rev. Dr. DeWitt uttered the parting 
words of blessing in the old language. It had 
quaint usages but a few years previous ; for very 
strange it seemed to modern eyes to see " the 
clerk " place, in a series of blackboards on the 
wall, the number of the first psalm that was to be 
sung, as if for the benefit of those who came late. 
There was a fitness in this choice of a place for 
the utterance of Mr. Adams' oration ; for the scene 
which that oration celebrated was all acted in real 
life but a brief distance from the doors of the old 
church. So hall and orator were worthy of each 
other ; and it was, in all its accompaniments, 
one of the great historical events of our annals. 

When I next saw Mr. Adams, it was at the 
breakfast- table in the Astor House. A number 
of years had passed ; but I recognized " the rare 
and picturesque old man," as Mc Dowell, of Vir- 
ginia, so beautifully designated him, when pro- 
nouncino' one of the Cono;ressi©nal eulomes. He 
seemed in good spirits, and immediately entered 
into conversation with a gentleman near him, 
whom I judged, by his words and look, to be a 
packet-ship captain, — of a class of gentlemen 
w^ho knew everybody, and were so often, for a 
voyage, at least, master of all around them, that 
their acquaintance included everywhere the wisest 
and worthiest. 



WHO GOES THERE? 103 

To my delight, their conversation took the 
agreeable direction of a talk about swimming; 
perhaps led thither by the aquatic association of 
the captain. Mr. Adams took the lead at once, 
and seemed quite pleased in alluding to his own 
skill and experience as a swimmer ; and he gave 
the statement of his beginning, in words somewhat 
memorable : " I," said he, " learned to swim at 
eleven years of age, in Boston harbor, alongside 
the frigate Alliance, in thirty feet ivater.'^ 

It was type of his varied and momentous career, 
— so often struggling alone in the conflicting tides 
of public opinion, — that he learned to swim in 
deep water. The Alliance, it will be remembered, 
was one of the vessels of war that were under 
command of our great naval hero of the Revolu- 
tion, John Paul Jones, of whom Walter Scott 
says, that he frightened Edinburgh out of its wits, 
and set " mine own romantic town " to all the 
wisdom of its bailies to discover how they should 
prevent his landing at Leith. This must have been 
just as Mr. Adams was going out with his father to 
the latter's high diplomatic service. Mr. Adams 
then went on to tell his friend of his swimming 
practice in the Potomac, every day, when he was 
President of the United States. He said this with 
a particularity, which, in a lesser man, would have 
seemed a little like calling this dignified fact into 



104 WHO GOES THERE? 

recollection. I was very much obliged to the mari- 
ner for his presence, in thus leading Mr. Adams 
to talk about himself. 

Governor Bradish dilated to me on the ex- 
traordinary versatility of Mr. Adams' acquire- 
ments, illustrating it by reference to his having 
seen him finish an entertainment of a dinner party 
by standing on the table and reciting a French 
play. But Charles King declared that one thing 
/ Mr. Adams could not do, — that was, write poetry ; 
and that he had, before this, been forced to ex- 
press this opinion to him editorially, especially in 
relation to the poem of Dermot McMarrough. It 
is quite likely that he could not do what is so sel- 
dom an ability mingled with the qualities of a 
statesman. His life was a poetic one, for it 
touched the varieties of human experience, except 
that he never seemed to have known what it was 
to feel pecuniary w^ant. He was defeated and 
almost proscribed, and rose above it with an in- 
creasing fame. He saw about all that was best in 
both the Old and New World, knew the wisest 
and greatest of all countries in civilization, and 
died in his duty. 

It is a fact, not generally known, that he visited 
Washington just before going forth on his diplo- 
matic career, being advised to do so. It would 
have been a picture worth perpetuation, this meet- 



WHO GOES THERE? 105 

ing of tlie keen, quick, resolute young man, in all 
his consciousness of the value of history, with 
the grand old man, who, with himself, had such 
strong ideas of what a republic should show itself 
in the eyes of the world. Mr. Adams had very 
little idea of the arts of popularity, though, 1 
doubt not, he fully liked the thing itself " How 
can he expect to be reelected," said one of his 
friends, " when he gives you his hand to shake as 
stiff as a shingle ? " 

That was a memorable speech and occasion of 
one, which was heard and witnessed by the citi- 
zens of Albany, when Mr. Adams addressed an 
impromptu crowd from the " stoop " (I must use 
the Albany word) of Matthew Gregory's house, 
in the row now absorbed by Congress Hall. He 
had felt that the people of New York moved with 
him on his journey, and he knew the words which 
were the key-note of their heart. That speech 
was admirably reported by Sherman Croswell, who 
was a master of his art. Mr. Adams defied and 
outlived calumny, and did that wonderful thing, — 
he made a lesser station the occasion of fame and 
reputation to him after he had occupied the 
greater. He almost, more than any other of our 
great men, could not rest and did not rest. Learn- 
mg to swim in deep water, he never sought the 
safetv of the shallower. 



106 WHO GOES THERE ^ 

While he was President, there was a party given 
at the White House, which derived most of its 
celebrity from some clever stanzas, written on its 
occasion, in which the brilliant or distinguished 
people who were likely to be there were men- 
tioned, and whose refrain was long remembered : 

" Beaux and belles and maids and madams, 
All are gone to Mrs. Adams'." 

I think there was a quiet but strong feeling in 
this country very much gratified, when Charles 
Francis Adams, his son, received the place of 
Minister to England, as it was a genealogy of dip- 
lomatic service which looked like stability. It 
helped us to combat the idea, that, in our country, 
there is no procession of talent. 

There are few things in our history as remark- 
able as the prediction made by Mr. Adams, of the 
consequences which would follow the annexation 
of Texas. In years hence, when the calm and 
just historian (whose name, at this moment, hap- 
pens to be unknown) shall write our record, the 
extraordinary document, in which the future was 
so portrayed, will be studied by every one. 

He did not write poetry, — Mr. King was right ; 
but he sometimes did succeed in verse ; and the 
most felicitous of all his stanzas are those in which 
he gives a catalogue of his wishes ; and it is mo- 
mentous in their review, that he seems to have 



WHO GOES THERE f 107 

been favored in a degree, and not a minute degree, 
with the reahzation of all, — wealth, honors, sta- 
tion, fame, the pleasant, and even the luxurious, 
things of life. While he had to wait for some of 
these, at length they came ; and he had, as nearly 
as it could be said of any of our public men, en- 
joyed, in the end, the harmony of a completed 
career ; and those publications which his son is 
editing will be another wonderful chapter in that 
history. 

He was deprived of a reelection to the presi- 
dency for causes and with consequences, which, as 
this is not a political history, it is not for these 
pages to relate. I do not doubt, that, all his life, 
he felt it to be a deep personal wrong ; for he was 
conscious of having served his country faithfully, 
and he had seen, just before him, Mr. Monroe's 
eight accorded years of quiet and easy success, 
and he knew, that, while Mr. Monroe was a very 
excellent man, himself had been one of the main 
arches of his administration. 

General Jackson was the new and triumphant 
arrival into the presidency. With opinions about 
that remarkable man which may be prejudices, but 
which, I believe, had a foundation which the 
calmer reflection of maturer years approves, I con- 
cede that, in the only interview I ever had with 
him, the impression was a pleasant one ; for, 



108 WHO GOES THERE f 

altliougli he looked sufficiently stern and, perhaps, 
severe, yet he had a courtesy of manner, when he 
chose to exercise it, which was potential ; and I 
have heard this stated, also, by the Rev. Dr. 
Campbell, of Albany, who knew all about him, 
who did not like him, and who maintained against 
him successfully a question in his department of 
action. I can see the old General even yet, in his 
room at the White House, talking so pleasantly 
with me about the only topic on which I happened 
to know anything that interested him, — the health 
of his friend, the Old Patroon of Albany. When 
I say, a pleasant manner, I mean gravely pleasant, 
and, of course, in dignity. Mr. Van Kleeck, of 
Albany, who flight be said to know all mankind, 
was my guide to the grandeur of the White 
House. 

Dr. Campbell's account of him illustrated the 
fact that he had two lives going on at the same 
moment, — that of the quiet, remote man of his 
Tennessee existence, who liked the small horizon 
of his plantation and its in and out door inci- 
dents best, and his own life, as possessed of a 
great power, in which he bore no contradiction, 
and in which he would express opinions which it 
was quite clear were rather of limited than en- 
larged view of public affairs. But he had the 
confidence of the people in a degree that few oth- 



WHO GOES THERE 1 JQO 

ers have possessed, and the way is not clear for his 
annals in their full truth yet. They will be writ- 
ten when we shall be possessed with the great and 
good idea that the truth is, after all, the very 
essence of valuable history. 

I recollect being at Boston when the news of 
General Jackson's death arrived there. It seemed 
to me to awaken very little notice. I think the 
administration of the General, however important 
at the time, w^as, in its effects, much sooner effaced 
than it was, in his day, suj^posed possible ; and the 
reason is, that it was a personal administration ; 
and after General Harrison was subsequently, as a 
successful soldier, elected, that incident in our his- 
tory was not alone. 

When the General was at New York, a vast 
crowd was gathered before the City Hall. He 
looked out at it, and, turning to Mr. Hubbell, 
said, " There are no nullifiers there." 

General Harrison finishes the list of the presi- 
dents who were born before our country ceased to 
be a colony of Great Britain. His frontier life 
had made him, comparatively, a stranger on the 
seaboard, and he came, in 1836, before the people 
rather by his history than by any personal associa- 
tions. His death, after the one month of presi- 
dential power, startled the whole country, as, first 
of all our chief rulers, he died while in possession 



110 WHO GOES THERE f 

of the first place. I was told that during the 
month he lived in the White House, his hospitality 
and his plans for hospitality were unbounded ; 
that he construed the welcome of the mansion 
almost up to its chanted promises, and that nothing 
could have averted severe financial embarrassment. 

I asked Mr. Clay about the General. " Ah ! " 
said he, " he was a good-hearted, clever old gen- 
tleman. When he was preparing for his inaugura- 
tion, he sent to me his address, and suggested to 
me to erase anything in it that I did not approve ; 
and, with this permission, I did run my pencil 
through some passages. Soon afterward he met 
me, and said, ' Mr. Clay, I have adopted all your 
suggestions except in those paragraphs that men- 
tion the Greeks and Romans. Why, Mr. Clay,' 
said General H., ' when I was in Congress, some- 
body was searching for me, and looking into the 
hall of representatives, could not see me, but he 
heard somebody making a speech, and saying 
something about the Greeks and Romans. *' That's 
him ; that's Harrison ! " said he. Mr. Clay you 
must leave me those.' " 

This incident, thus related by such distinguished 
authority, proves that General Harrison had great 
good humor and great good sense. 

There was something grand in the fact that 
General Harrison had stood up, in Congress, the 



^ WHO GOES THERE f. Ill 

sole representative of all the great north-west, — a 
grandeur that we, and those who shall come after 
us, shall best know as we see to what that north- 
west has arisen. He was to its civilization what 
Daniel Boone had been to its barharism, the rep- 
resentation of that which was to come, — the new 
life, in which the dominion of the intellectual over 
the material was to be developed. 

General Harrison's father-in-law, John Cleves 
Symmes, was of the pioneer stock ; but he was 
hfted up into the world's observation chiefly by the 
theory which he promulgated, that this was a hol- 
low world (and, in one sense, we all believed and 
yet believe him), enterable at the poles, and that 
stran2:e and momentous discoveries awaited those 
who should find way thither, and that, in some 
way, the northern lights issued thence. On this 
theme I heard him lecture at the Uranian Hall, 
Albany, and remember that, when he- read his 
manuscript, he was prosy and dull, and that when 
he went off into extempore episodes, he was bright 
and interesting. His ideas had plausible place in 
their day of utterance, and encountered what has 
been the fate of all projectors, the semi-ridicule, 
semi-illustration of a book called Symzonia, in 
which the visit inter-spherical was, with vivid ad- 
ventures, accomplished. His theory at last melted 
away like the stories of the Arcadia or the south- 
ern continent. 



112 WHO GOES THERE? 

General Harrison's name, in its political sobri- 
quet of " Tippecanoe," exercised the vocal powers 
of more men than this country has ever before or 
since found with will or capacity for song. As, in 
this volume, political history is only incidentally 
introduced, this theme of the great song of 1840 
may but be glanced at. Its refrain was heard in 
all varieties of human intercourse, and a stranger 
then for the first time coming among us would 
have believed that the reputation of Germany, for 
popular singing — I may not say melody — had 
found formidable rivalry. 

How many side-lights were thrown amidst the 
scholars of the old days of our French war and 
Revolution, by the conversation of the old men and 
the old soldiers, who, rising to no special rank or 
place, told us of the curious people that they had 
known, or the curious scenes in which they had 
interminMed. I use the word J^'rench war to 
designate the period in which our ancestors thought 
that their very existence was bound up in main- 
taining the supremacy of England's power over 
that of the Bourbons ; and, as the great questions 
of government and of right really were in that day, 
their action was correct. It is a singular incident 
that General Washington did not designate the 
war in which we achieved independence, by the 
term in which it was always named, — the Revo- 



WHO GOES THERE f 113 

lution, — but as, "our dispute with Great Brit- 



am. 



Even as late as 1810, a meeting was called of 
*' all officers and soldiers who served one or more 
campaigns in the old French war," " to petition 
Congress for the recovery of our rights." Alas for 
the chance of the rights that had waited from 1754 
till 1810 ! This meeting was probably got up by a 
Henry Watkins, who served in the French war, 
was present at the siege of the Moro Castle, and 
escaped being blown up by being absent on an 
errand, served in the revolutionary war, and 
made a show of going out in the war of 1812. 
A campaigner of such varied* experiences might 
be excused for holding on to his right of recovery. 

It must be recollected that our ancestors made 
up their record of life in a country where they had 
all the eventful variety of circumstance that could 
come to them, placed midway between their neces- 
sary entanglement with the dissensions of Europe, 
— very far off quarrels, imperfectly understood, and 
not the less eagerly championed, — and the barbar- 
ism which in the guise of the yet somewhat power- 
ful Indian tribes gave them continual annoyance 
and trouble. The open, square, broad warfare of all 
that civilization can present, warring against itself, 
they did not know. To them the forest was the 
representative of a treacherous friend and vindic- 



114 WHO GOES THERE? 

tive enemy ; and the sea was the messenger of 
alarm as often as the old dynasties of Europe mm- 
istered to their ambition by war. 

A letter is before me from a Major-General in 
the revolutionary army, dated 1780, which shows 
how, as face answereth unto face in a mirror, do 
the features of a great war find resemblance. In 
this letter we can see the mastery of gold over all 
transactions at all times. The perplexed General 
is waiting to an officer in the department of the 
Commissary-General, and he says : " The unex- 
pected disappointments met with from every quar- 
ter from which I expected supplies are likely to be 
attended with the^ worst consequences, and call 
upon us to repeat and redouble our exertions. 
The occasion of all these disappointments is said 
by all to be the want of money in the purchasing 
departments, which the purchasers say has not 
only put it out of their power to make sufficient 
contracts, but has also prevented their sending up 
the small stock of supplies they have been able to 
preserve. I am therefore compelled, in order to 
relieve the pressing necessities of the army, to fall 
upon a measure extraordinary perhaps in its nature, 
but rendered by that necessity unavoidable. We 
will therefore endeavor to contract for the supplies 
necessary for the support of this department upon 
the following terms. You will purchase the sup- 



WHO GOES THERE ? 115 

plies at the cheapest price possible for hard money 
to be paid October 1 ; and if it cannot be paid in 
coin at that time, yon may engage that those of 
whom yon purchase shall be paid, in paper money 
in the proportion it bears to gold and silver at 
the time of payment, so that there shall be no loss 
by depreciation ; and you may assure them that 
rather than that there should be any failure the 
public property should be sold." ' 

And thus we find our fathers, in the dark and 
" hard winter " time of 1780, reading the same 
page of finance that later years have read to their 
descendants. 

I met an old soldier, by the rmme of Parks, who, 
in 1847, stated himself as one hundred and five 
years old ; but that was not so. He was only 
ninety-seven, if I may use the word onl^ of lon- 
gevity like that. He told us of his perilous adven- 
tures in the Sullivan campaign, — a wild series of 
adventures, in regard to which the stories are free 
to ally themselves with white man or Indian, ac- 
cording to the information or imagination of the 
narrator. The old man illustrated the want of 
material for long marching, which embarrassed the 
armies of those days, by his recital of his being 
compelled to wade across one of the lakes. He 
told me of his memory of the effect of the earth- 
quake of 1755, — that great trembling of the earth 



116 WHO GOES THERE? 

in which the dread catastrophe of Lisbon occurred ; 
of the shaking of the httle diamond panes of glass 
in the windows, — and this was doubtless true, for 
so much of it wa3 experienced in North America. 

Major Adam Hoops, a choice relic of the revo- 
lutionary officer, prompt, erect and decided, had 
been an aid of Sullivan, and lived to see the har- 
vests of the white man smile, where he and those 
with him had devastated all that the Indian had 
cultured. He had a very different idea of Brandt's 
history from that given by Mr. Stone's Life of 
the famed Thayandenagea. 

How strangely in the loom of life the hands of 
war and peace — red as is one and white as is the 
other — grasp together in Progress. An old bat- 
teau or flat-boat used by that invading army in 
the tortuous and perilous voyage down the Susque- 
hanna, was, as it was left to decay, taken to the 
Seneca and then to Cayuga, by those who went 
thither to make the " settlement." 

In their trip on the Seneca, they passed over a 
route which another journey has made more 
famous. 

He who kept the French throne warm for the 
completion of the time when " the empire " should 
be ready for '' the nephew of his uncle," was once, 
like that nephew, a wanderer in our own land, 
taking a larger circle of travel, however, than the 



WHO GOES THERE? 117 

more concentrated, silent man, who waited and 
waited, and won at last. Louis Philippe had been 
at Canandaigua, the guest of Thomas Morris, — a 
man himself always memorable, and whose very 
lovely wife — of the beautiful Kane family — I 
saw^ as a widow, in 1843, at Boston ; and, as illus- 
trating the rise of the country, this lovely lady 
told me that her bridal journey was on horseback 
to Canandaigua. Thomas Morris was, in after 
life, a favorite guest of John Jacob Astor, and his 
conversation did much to enliven that table. 

Mr. Morris gave letters to a citizen of Elmira, 
which was called at that time, by a great poverty 
of variety in nomenclature, Newtown. George 
Mills, of the Chemung low country, who was liv- 
ing in 1848, remembered the royal Frenchman. 
He had come from Geneva, down the Seneca lake, 
in a schooner, just built by the Captain WiUiam- 
son who, at one time, had thought of buying all 
the country which is now Ohio. Louis Philippe 
took the journey from the head of Seneca lake to 
Elmira ; and it was good taste to do so, for a love- 
lier land seldom the sun elsewhere looks upon. 
At Elmira, the travellers took a boat down the 
Susquehanna, stopping, I suppose, to refresh him- 
self with his own language at Frenchtown. 

A few years since, Mr. Brodhead, the accon^ 
plished historian, procured for me a map of the 



118 WHO GOES THEREf 

king's route, approved by the king himself, which 
I gave to one of the steamboat proprietors of the 
Seneca lake. Time gives value to these authentic 
illustrations of history, when the record of the life 
of the rulers of men becomes all that is preserved 
of the annals of the ages. 

One by one I have seen — and seen with sor- 
row — our people demolish the j)hysical structm^es 
that were evidences in the stories of the past. To 
the miserable narrowness or indifference of public 
sentiment that permitted John Hancock's house to 
be sacrificed, I have already alluded; and that is 
but one of many. The grounds of old battle- 
fields, which might have been j^reserved as public 
property, have been unnecessarily levelled. In 
that wonderful city, Chicago, the block-house was 
the type of its youth. It told, better than statis- 
tics, what sudden life had come to that lap of the 
lakes, and yet, down it went ! So did Fort Stan- 
wix ; and it is questionable if our eyes would yet 
be rejoicing in the picturesque ruins of Ticonder- 
oga, but that the golden step of fashion-travel led 
that way, and what, in other places, had been de- 
nied to history, was there preserved to gain. 

The Declaration of Independence was first read 
to the citizens of Albany by Matthew Visscher, 
standing in front of the tiien City Hall, at the 
north-east corner of Court (South Broadway) and 



WHO GOES THERE f ng 

Hudson street. The gathering was tumultuous, 
because there was a popular belief that the read- 
ing was to be prevented by the inroad of those 
who, as yet, adhered to the old government. 

Now such a scene as that was, deserves, in the 
annals of an ancient city, some local remem- 
brance ; for this aid to memory is old as the stones 
set up for the swellings of Jordan. As our coun- 
try grows old, very old, all these incidents will be 
sought for, and sometimes with utterly false results. 
I have made one of a formal and elaborate proces- 
sion to the Rock of Plymouth, when all that I 
could see or find of it was a small remainder, more 
than half hid in the debris of a commercial wharf, and 
another piece broken off and carried " up street." 

The field of Runnymede, which clarifies so 
many perorations in speeches about wresting 
our liberty and our rights out of the hands of ty- 
rants, is even yet, so some one recently told me, a 
tilled field ; and that the Old World has set all 
such associations in the crystal of song and story 
is, at this hour, the occasion of the journey thither 
of thousands. Our metropolis has neglected its 
treasure of historical association. They have 
passed away, one by one ; and now, all that we 
can do is to admire the good work by which the 
Historical Society, like Old Mortality, regraves 
the words on crumbling stone, too often amidst the 
mist of doubt, that neglect alone has raised. 



120 WHO GOES THERE? 

The voice of the wise man tells us not to say 
that the former days were better than these ; and I 
obey the counsel, as well I may. The age of prog- 
ress and prosperity in which we live is indeed 
far better for all the material, and, perhaps, for all 
the mental, interest of man. Far more smoothly 
and sweetly, in our day of peace, the stream of 
our life moves on ; but so much the more do we 
enjoy the contrast of the tumultuous and bold 
scenes, in which the ancient colonies, with all their 
romance of loyalty to crowns and dynasties, to old 
families and to ancestral names, became new and 
powerful states, known in their own name and 
own right to the earth. We feel all this the 
keener, as in the stormy day of the winter the 
luxury of the home-hearth Is brightest. 

I have detained my reader, over repeated apolo- 
gies, for so long, by the side of these days, reluc- 
tant to leave them. They are pictures not again 
to be painted, — dramas not again to be acted. 
When again shall any man arise among us, in 
whom it would be in the recognized fitness of 
things that we should see him, as Washington 
was seen when he delivered his Inaugural address, 
" dressed In a full suit of the richest black velvet, 
with diamond knee-buckles and square, silver 
buckles set upon shoes japar^ned with the most 
scrupulous neatness, black silk stockings, his shirt 



WHO GOES THERE? 121 

ruffled at breast and wrists, a light dress sword, his 
hair powdered," and thus uttering to Congress and 
the people the words of a purity and a patriotism, 
in whose truth they all believed. 

Do we often think how, in the strange things of 
history, it was, that Washington died just at the 
cloSe — the closing days, of the old century, as if 
time had no work for him in that new and won- 
derful volume which it opened on the first day of 
January, 1800 ? The pilot left the helm just as 
the stormy election of that year was to agitate the 
sea of affi\irs, and he was spared the. delicate diffi- 
culties which surrounded a man who had united 
all hearts. 

A few years passed away, and the slow dignity 
of the old ways saw its decadence in the success of 
Mr. Fulton's efforts to make steam the servant of 
the wants of man. I heard the recollections of 
two very interesting companions, in different 
spheres of action, of Mr. Fulton. Judge Wilson, 
of Albany, was of those who accompanied him in 
the first of all his Hudson River voyages. A 
Quaker friend remonstrated with Mr. Wilson on 
trusting himself with " such a wild fowl " as this 
most absurd structure was believed to be by all 
practical people. But those who had essayed to 
follow Fulton in this bold movement were not to 
be kept off by ridicule ; and to his imperfect and 



122 WHO GOES THERE 1 

rude boat they went, and off it went, and it 
stopped, and the crowd on the wharf jeered, and 
Fuhon felt as if the laugh touched his inmost 
heart by its sarcasm ; but he believed in the might 
of the bubbling steam, and his boat went on, and 
— the new chapter in the world's history was 
plainly to be read on the Hudson River. 

In 1851, that extraordinary '' excursion " was 
made, in which the liberality of the Chicago and 
Rock Island Railroad Company displayed to a thou- 
sand guests the grandeur, and not less, the beauty, 
of the Upper Mississippi. Such hospitality was 
beyond the old stories of the princely entertain- 
ments of Blenheim and Chatworth. 

Of all that we saw, we saw most and best the 
river, the Mississippi. I recollect that we gave 
cheers as we came in sight of it. The river, the 
river, its exquisite, park-like scenery, those bluffs, 
in beauty beyond our dreamings, so calm and ma- 
jestic, so varied in every mile of its magnificent 
progress, — it has neither parallel nor rival. And 
this proud river we had ascended quietly and re- 
sistlessly, overcoming its rapids, conquering its cur- 
rents, pressing on, as though our course was over a 
smooth lake ; and we owed this to the genius of 
Robert Fulton. And this great triumph was wit- 
nessed by one who had been his chosen, his inti- 
mate friend, — Mr. Waldo, a name known to all 



WHO GOES THERE1 123 

familiar with the history of American painters. 
A very pleasant old artist he was, of cultivation 
and taste and kindly manner, bright faculties, and 
active mind. He had been the companion and fel- 
low-scholar of Fulton. While together, they pur- 
sued the study of painting under the tuition of 
Benjamin West, the president of the Royal Acad- 
emy. While engaged in the task of the painter, 
the mind of Fulton was occupied with the steam- 
engine. It was building in mental fabric, shaft, 
valve, cylinder, in his brain, and he looked for- 
ward to a nobler success. He told Mr. Waldo 
that the great triumph for him would be the use 
of the steamboat on the Mississippi. There, he 
said, was to be the scene of his victory. 

And yet Fulton thought that he was greatest in 
the fact that he had, as he thought, invented a sure 
instrument of destruction of hostile ships, by his 
submarine torpedo. So strangely inaccurate are 
men in determining even their own fame. 

Chancellor Livingston, who was the friend and 
fellow- owner of the Fulton grant, it is said, after 
the introduction of other boats than their own, 
would not go to New York except by coach or 
carriage. It was a monstrous wrong in this State, 
that it did not stand by Fulton's exclusive right 
when it was attacked in processes of law. It is 
but a synonym of the word just, that the word 



124 WHO GOES THERE f 

" exclusive " was used. What inventor ever de- 
served reward, if this man did not? And 
although there may be ever so many finicalities of 
reasoning, — that somebody, prior to him, knew that 
steam had power, — it was his heart that dared, and 
his hand that ventured, the application of the 
power to great practical use. Steamboats, that 
could move against wind and tide, — those were the 
things accomplished by Fulton. I heard a brief 
word of the argument in tlie Court of Errors, 
when Thomas Addis Emmet was heard for the 
heirs of Fulton. It was in this argument, that he 
interwove with his reasoning a pleasantry ; for I 
suppose the characteristic fancy of his country did 
not desert him in his exile. " They tell you," 
said he, " that this is a coasting question " (the 
assertion on the other side was that New York 
had no power to grant a privilege affecting a coast- 
ing voyage) ; " but I say, that you might rather 
call it, as far as our own Hudson river is con- 
cerned, a banking question." 

The heirs of Robert Fulton, since his life was 
too brief for the enjoyment of the reward himself, 
ought to have been as opulent as the nation could 
have made its greatest benefactor. I remember to 
have been a witness, in 1828, or thereabout, to a 
grant by Morgan Lewis, acting for the representa- 
tives of so much of the franchise as was yet left to 



WBO GOES THERE f 125 

them, of the right, till 1836, to navigate one of 
the interior lakes of New York, where the tide did 
not give '' national " jurisdiction. 

The history of the progress of steam-navigation 
in this country, from Fitch's rude paddle-boat to 
the grandeur of the St. John, would be, of itself, 
a pleasant and valuable volume : but that is not in 
the plan of this book. Yet it is illustrative of the 
taste of the leading men of the period, or illustra- 
tive of the general education and influences, to no- 
tice what were the names or designation of the 
very earliest boats. In official advertisements, as 
late as 1808 and 1809 (the navigation beginning 
in 1807), the owners designate their vessel yet as 
the steamboat. First of all, came courtesies to the 
distinguished Livingston, who had associated him- 
self with the inventor, and Clermont, his manor- 
house, and the Chancellor, his erminial title ; and, 
after that, something of an ornate fancy, — the 
Paragon and the Car of Neptune, — flights of the 
imagination which must have bewildered the plain 
people of. that day ; and then, the indication of 
the widely-diffused feeling in respect to a then 
recent, terrible calamity, the destruction by Are 
of the Theatre at Richmond, in a boat bearing 
that city's name. 

Some old Indian's strange name, — Walk-in- 
the-water, heralded the steam voyages on Lake 



126 WHO GOES THERE? 

Erie, with that of the great man of the west, — 
Henry Clay ; and all American use of steam as a 
power on the ocean was led by a vessel bearing the 
name of one of the southern cities, — Savannah. 

In these names, we can read rather of the local, 
than wide-spread or national, attention to the en- 
terprise, at the time of its inception. In 1784, 
General Washington expressed himself as having 
been, to that time, a disbeliever in the ability of 
steam-power to overcome wind and current or 
tide ; but he concedes that Mr. Rumsey's power, 
then shown to him, has induced him to think that 
it may be done. He did not dream that every 
sea, lake, and river would possess steamboats 
bearing, as their proudest designation, his own 
name. 

De Witt Clinton's admirable personal appearance 
is strongly impressed on my memory. Indeed, it 
remains as a page of singular dignity and courtli- 
ness in life's recollections, seeing the manner in 
which he bowed to some ladies whom he met in 
State street, — the hat completely off, and the 
homage such as, from Clinton, any lady might have 
given charming acknowledgment. Prefacing a 
notice of Governor Chnton by allusion to his 
courtesy might not be truthful indication of his 
general characteristics ; but of this I could only 
give the testimony of two very differing witnesses, 



WHO GOES THERE? 127 

both his abiding personal friends, and intimate 
with and thorouglily appreciative of him. Indeed, 
it was interesting to me to see how really great 
men such as, beyond ail contradiction, were John 
C. Spencer and Dr. T. Romeyn Beck, could have 
taken such opposite views of one man. ' 

Dr. Beck said, CHnton delighted to say cutting 
things to people around him, — things that hurt 
them ; but Mr. Spencer said he thought the doc- 
tor in error, that Clinton was not a rude or sarcas- 
tic man, but that he had a great fondness for joking 
men, or, as the phrase is, for running them ; and 
this was misconstrued as being sarcastic. Dr. 
Beck thought Clinton joked very hard, if it was all 
joke, and he doubted if Mr. Spencer was as likely 
as himself to know Clinton in familiarity. 

I think it was the opinion of the time that Gov- 
ernor Clinton did not possess what is characterized 
as popular manners ; but, in the face of all this, 
none of the great men of our State were ever so 
personally popular. Even the charming manners 
of Governor Tompkins, whose way of talking to 
men and talking with them, sent them from him 
delighted, even if all this pleasantness had con- 
tained a negative to their requests, even he could 
not concentrate to himself and on himself the favor 
of the people. It was thought that Clinton did 
not always receive kindly or rather welcome kindly 



128 f^'ffO GOES THERE ^ 

the very efforts to aid liim in his wishes or his af- 
fairs ; but he had friends the most earnest and de- 
voted, and was sustained in all circumstances and 
above all circumstances. This is the end of pop- 
ularity, if it is not its way. 

His party might and did go to wreck around 
him ; but he stood up and triumphant amidst that 
wreck. The truth is, he was believed by the peo- 
ple to be, as he indeed was, a very great man ; 
and the people felt that pride in their possession of 
such a man that they did not ask of him the per- 
petual step- forward that seems necessary to the 
preservation of lesser men. Wherever the man 
of power, the man of government was to indicate 
himself, in all personal public position, there Gov- 
ernor Clinton was superb. I saw him in the 
midst of that which to him was of the greatest of 
triumphs, for it was the success of his own predic- 
tions of success, long adhered to, long maintained, 
against all forms of sarcasm and ridicule and oblo- 
quy. It was when he stood on the deck of the 
canal boat, — either the Seneca Chief or the 
Young Lion of the West, — and entered the Hud- 
son River in the great opening day of the canals. 
There, surrounded by a group of the gentlemen of 
the chief cities of the seaboard and the towns of 
Western New York, he was the man to whom all 
looked ; and although the highway bore the offi- 



WHO GOES THEME? 129 

cial designation of the Erie Canal, it was the pop- 
ular judgment, and they were right, that it should 
be known as the Clinton Canal. To him that day- 
was the proof that he was right as well as bold, 
when he had pledged his political existence in the 
fact that a route of internal navigation from the 
lakes to tide-water could be accomphshed, and 
that it was a revolution in the progress of the State 
of New York and of the great domain then just 
opening, which was known in the vague grandeur 
of word as the West. The people exulted in look- 
ing at him ; and the great pageant of that era had 
as its grandest feature the presence of De Witt 
Chnton. It was a lordly time throughout. The 
progress was a scene of earnest rejoicing, for it 
told to all that the prosperity of the country re- 
ceived new impulses from those hours. 

Arches were built, and all that the imperfect 
condition of decorative art could suojo-est was 
adopted to indicate the public festivity. Greatest 
of all was the aquatic procession, the flotilla of 
steamboats in which Clinton proceeded in his jour- 
ney to the ocean. We were to know the very 
moment of the mingling of the waters of the Erie 
with the- Atlantic by a common telegraph ; for 
Mr. Morse in those days was thinking most of the 
tints he was placing on canvas, and this new 
voice of electricity, which to-day is talking all the 



130 WHO GOES THERE ^ 

wide world around, had not been evoked by sci- 
ence. The cannon were placed so near to each 
other that from Sandy Hook to Buffalo, sound 
should blend with sound, and, quick as it could 
travel, Buffalo should know that the waters were 
one. I listened in earnest expectation to hear 
the southern report which should be the signal for 
the Albany gun on the pier to communicate the 
news to north and west ; but I believe I did not 
hear it. Nevertheless, the gunner having his time- 
table and knowing when he ought to have heard 
by that, believed, as in Prussia, that all things are 
regulated, and let his cannon speak. To-day San 
Francisco might hear before the vase was dry from 
which the water was poured. 

And yet attached to and identified with the 
great canal system as was Governor Clinton, he 
saw clearly what was to be the use and preemi- 
nence of railways. There was a small model of a 
railway in the executive room at Albany, and he 
led one of the members of Assembly from a western 
county to it, and said to him, " Here, sir, is the 
way in which you are yet to reach this city." 

To appreciate fully what was Clinton's exultation 
at beino; the master fio;ure in the scene of the 
canal's triumph in completion, we must have stood 
with him in that day at Rome, so many years pre- 
vious, when he saw and participated in the re- 



WHO GOES THERE? 131 

moval of the first earth for the work, — a shovel- 
ful of dirt taken from a field near the decaying ram- 
parts of old Fort Stanwix. There was a grandeur of 
self-reliance in believing that to be the new token 
of a completed river over all the very long distance 
that separated Lake Erie and the Hudson River. 

I saw him when his appearance, from the pecu- 
liar condition of the public mind, elicited great 
attention. It was when he, in company with the 
Patroon, headed a procession of the order of free- 
masons, garnished and glittering in the regalia of 
the brethren. 

I recollect that I was employed by a friend of 
his to make a copy of his last message to the Legis- 
lature of New York, and that the introductory 
words, as he wrote them, were, " Fellow-citizens 
of the Senate and House of Representatives," as 
if he had, at the moment, been thinking of Con- 
gress, and then he had erased " of Representa- 
tives," and substituted the proper form of " As- 
sembly." He was so kind as to approve the man- 
ner in which the copy was made ; and I remember, 
in his note so stating, he used a word wliich was 
then unusual, and which then seemed to me quite 
in the dignities, — ^' the chirography is good." 

No one who was in Albany at the time can 
forget the evening of his death, or the occasion and 
day of his funeral. I was sitting in a public read- 



132 WHO GOES THERE? 

ing-room at tlie time, — the evening of the 11th of 
February, 1828, — and a gentleman entered, hur- 
riedly saying, " He is dead ! " We did not need 
explanation or further comment to know to whom 
this referred. We felt it must be Clinton ; and as 
the tidings of his sudden departure spread, the 
feeling was absorbing. I have never, on any 
other occasion of public loss, witnessed any such 
deep, earnest, pervading grief as was felt in rela- 
tion to his death. It was the sudden going out of 
a great light, — the sharply quick closing of a great 
career, in which all were interested ; for it seemed 
to be a universal opinion that the tide was rising 
which was, beyond all doubt, to bear him to the 
presidency ; as, indeed, much of the friendly feel- 
ino; to General Jackson covered, -as its strongest 
element, the belief that Governor Clinton was to 
be at his side and his successor. 

His remains were laid out in state, as I think it 
may not improperly be designated in this instance, 
and there was a great concourse of people, who 
moved around the coffin, gazing at his face. I 
recollect being impressed with the simplicity of the 
inscription on the coffin-plate ; 

"De Witt Clinton, 
Died 

February 11, 1828, 
While Governor of the State of New York.** 



WHO GOES THERE? 133 

The scene of the public funeral, which, in some- 
thing of grandeur, was conducted by the authority 
of the Legislature, was very remarkable in its sin- 
cerity of sorrow. A great multitude gathered 
around the house, which was that known as the 
Banyer House, on the south-east corner of Steuben 
and North Pearl streets, and the long procession 
made its way to a private vault, — a little stone 
building in one of the upper western streets. 

The suddenness of this death was a shock to the 
public feeling. It put an end at once to a large 
chapter of political purpose, and it seemed to begin 
at once the era of new measures, and to admit 
into broader and stronger light those to whom 
Clinton had been the one obstacle that could not 
be removed. 

And yet this ought not to have been an occur- 
rence unexpected. The clear and prophetic skill 
of the eminent David Hosack had declared, months 
previous, that Governor Clinton could not live be- 
yond the then coming March, and his judgment 
was only too true. I think that at this day, as 
then, the status of Governor Clinton, as a great 
man, is of the very first of all New York's hst. 
It may be to this hour a theme of regret, that 'the 
first place in the government of the nation was 
not filled by him. In a better sense than Keats 
used it of himself, it may be said of CHnton — the 



134 WHO GOES THERE f 

canal being his memorial — "his name is writ in 
water." 

Governor Clinton was run to the eyelashes — 
as the sporting men say — in his last contest, 
when William B. Rochester was selected to run 
against him. I know that there was the greatest 
anxiety manifested by Governor Clinton's warmest 
friends in relation to his success, and the figures 
looked very ugly for a long time ; and he who was 
so suddenly powerful, was washed ashore on the 
beach of the Atlantic, after a wild and fierce* 
storm, which wrecked the steamship in which he 
was a passenger ; and " Mr. Rochester, a cabin 
passenger," was all the record that the chronicle 
of the hour made. The State of New York was 
spared the sorrow — I will not use any other 
word, lest it might seem as of political reflection — 
of the thought that defeat had met De Witt Clin- 
ton. He took the name which had been eminent 
and powerful even in our colonial days, and with 
which the history of the State had commenced, 
and made it the pride of the State. No wonder 
was it that the State, forgetting all party feeling, 
should have made for him a deep and sincere 
mourning. And yet the State did not do for his 
great service what would have been done in Eng- 
land for a statesman whose policy had so practi- 
cally benefitted it ; and through whom it had be- 



WHO GOES THERE? 135 

come the great highway of all the north, fearing 
the subtle and hidden injury, — very subtle and 
hidden, which is said to exist in the remembrance, 
after their terms of service have closed, — New 
York coldly turned aside, and gave the name of 
Clinton a place, as Mr. Jefferson says, " among 
the worthies who deserve from mankind an ever- 
lasting remembrance " — but that was all. 

We have avoided a pension list for civil service, 
and Chnton's great work for his State remained 
unrewarded. Fulton was thrust out of his fran- 
chise ; Jefferson strained his ingenuity and his 
morality to devise a lottery in his old age, as a 
means of getting money to make his extreme old 
age comfortable. It is not too late for us yet to do 
what will cost us nothing, — to give to the canal 
the designation of the Clinton canal. It is no 
more in its results of Erie than of Michio-an or 
Huron. The most remote corner of Lake Michi- 
gan furnishes more tonnage to the canal than do 
all the shores of lake Erie. Is this suggestion but 
an imaginative one ? It may be so, yet it may 
find its palliation in admiration for this great 
statesman of New York. 

Of Governor Tompkins, that pleasant and pop- 
ular man of the people, I recollect only seeing his 
entry into Albany with something of a public re- 
ception. General Wickham, of Goshen, related 



136 fVHO GOES THERE? 

to me an incident which the Governor told of him- 
self, while enjoying the hospitalities (and cordial 
and generous they were) of Mr. Wickham's house. 
He said that he found himself a judge of the 
Supreme Court at a very early age ; for the zeal 
of his party to do him honor was not to be re- 
strained by the bounds of a cold prudence. It was 
a formidable thing to be a judge in that day. 

Well, one of the first circuits to be held by the 
young judge was that of Scoharie county, and one 
of the first questions to be decided was whether a 
certain old deed, produced in evidence, was an 
ancient instrument which proved itself; and the 
argument, by the grave and venerable and learned 
counsellors, the Van Vechtens and Henrys and 
Cadys, was astute and profound, quite enough 
to bewilder the judge, who, in despair, looked at 
the deed, and, as he said, saw by its worn and 
musty appearance that it was of any supposable 
age ; and so he decided, and was thus relieved of 
the argument which he felt was only bewildering 
him. 

He presided at the Constitutional Convention 
of 1821, Avhere the good and great and wise of 
our State met to give a new constitution, — one of 
the first surges of that great unrest and discontent 
with the tested and the proved, which the verse 
thus condenses : 



WHO GOES THERE 1 137 

*' All things old are over old ; 
Nothing new is new enough ; 
We will teach mankind that we can make 
A world of better stuif." 

How much better the physical is in our early 
recollection than -the intellectual, is illustrated by 
all of us. A great flood, a great fire, a vivid color, 
a comet, is remembered when association with the 
great and the gifted has left no impression on us. 
I once endeavored to find out the date of marriage 
of an elderly person who was unlettered. She 
could not state how long her married life had been, 
but when asked, " Were you married before or 
after the eclipse, the great eclipse ? " then she 
answered promptly enough, " The year after." 

Of all that convention I recollect nothing of its 
session except seeing governor Tompkins in the 
chair ; but I have a distinct impression of the sen- 
sation created throughout Albany by the sudden 
death of Mr. Jansen, one of the representatives of 
Ulster county, while attending the exhibition of 
Peale's great picture, ''The Court of Death." 
The mournful coincidence was in all hearts and on 
all tongues. 

Through what a succession of celebrated and 
illustrious names the ownership of the mansion, 
once occupied by Governor Tompkins, has passed, 
to end in the best of all uses — that of a church ! 



138 WHO GOES THERE f 

Yates, and Tompkins, and Seward, and the Kanes. 
It is not a local record alone that is written in 
these, and the annals of whatever is courteous and 
brilliant would, for the appreciation of all, be im- 
perfectly written if these were excluded. 

She is dead whose name is most imperishably 
associated with that house when it was the re- 
sidence of Oliver Kane. In beauty, glittering ; 
in wit, brilliant ; in personal fascination, un- 
equalled ; in thought, expression, conversation, im- 
pressive, original, winning, — she made the hours 
passed with her, radiant ; and it is of the most im- 
pressive of all monitions of the fading of all that 
is loved or lovely, to have seen her name in the 
catalogue of the grave. 

That convention, over which Governor Tomp- 
kins presided, included namgs that might claim the 
best memories of the country. Did it enumerate 
in its list any greater man than Elisha Williams ? 
It is not possible that the universal plaudit be- 
stowed on his powers, by all who remember him, 
can be in error. He must have been great who 
could deserve all this. A sharp examination of a 
witness is all that I can personally recollect of him ; 
but every man that heard him, talks rapturously 
about his charm of word. Especially did William 
Kent talk to me about him ; and to have ' been 
praised by William Kent was high eulogy. The 



WHO GOES THERE? 139 

choice word, the exquisite figure, the persuasive 
manner, the denunciation, the sarcasm, if those 
were the weapons he desired to use. I heard some 
one say that it was ascertained afterwards that 
much of that which seemed the brilHant creation 
of the instant was the prepared and arranged work 
of study ; and yet, such is the conflict of testi- 
mony about all men, I was also informed that he 
did not write easily. It is possible to reconcile all 
this. The fancies of men come fast and flashing. 
To be preserved in that which can be available, 
the process of writing, may be slow indeed ; as 
used afterwards, the act of utterance may give to 
them again all that was brilliant and glowino-. 
We can all understand this when we know that 
Moore's rose-leaf words, which fall with such soft- 
ness on the ear, were closely examined and tested 
before they were marshalled into metrical arrange- 
ment ; and that Campbell's grand lyrics were 
thought about, and thought around, and all over, 
and beat out. Whether by preparation or im- 
pulse, Williams rose in the court or in the leo-isla- 
ture, the master of the hour, and courts, and juries, 
and conventions obeyed the talisman. Perhaps he 
was not as confident of success as Dudley Marvin, 
another most remarkable man, who said of some 
unfortunate prisoner, *' He did not employ me, 
and he was hung." 



140 WHO GOES THERE? 

When Governor Tompkins and Governor De 
Witt Clinton held the station of chief magistrate 
of New York, they had great power of patronage. 
Under the constitution of 1777 and 1821, they 
were, to a great extent, the " fountains of honor." 
They managed this perilous power very differ- 
ently. The one made himself the delight of the 
people ; the other, it is true, sustained himself, but 
it was by the* force of his talent against his defi- 
ciency in that excellent little virtue of mind — 
tact. Governor Clinton was over-careful, and 
brouo;ht worlds of trouble on himself. When an 
office was vacant, and a candidate presented him- 
self, he said, " Let us wait, perhaps there will be 
others;" and of course others, by the quantity, 
presented themselves, and of the many only one 
was fortunate ; the others went home to consider 
themselves greatly aggrieved men. Not so with 
Governor Tompkins. When the place was 
vacant, if the man that asked first was a worthy 
and proper recipient, he gave him the place at 
once. Others came for it ; he heard them, said 
he had made a choice, would have been happy 
to have seen them first ; why did they not come 
sooner ? Each man went home convinced that it 
was not Governor Tompkins' fault that the office 
was not theirs. He, the Governor, was a noble 
and a true-hearted man. Their loss had been in 



WHO GOES THERE? 141 

their own negligence, and hence Daniel D. Tomp- 
kins was the delight of the people. 

I suppose that in the political annals of this 
State, the people were never in a greater embar- 
rassment of good, than when called on to choose 
for their Governor — as they were in 1816 and 
1820 — between Tompkins and Rufus King, 
Tompkins and De Witt CKnton. We can imag- 
ine the bewildered election and the perplexed suf- 
fra£:e, and that there was the contented feeling that 
the result, in either case, must be a great victory. 

Ambrose Spencer, who took such strong and 
determined grasp of the business of that conven- 
tion, as he did of all that came before him in life, 
was ever to me the personification of a ruler, — not 
of a judge, — distinguished as he is in the memo- 
ries of men and in the record for eminence in the 
latter department of human action ; but it was 
difficult to imao-ine that man of almost resistless 
utterance of opinion, amounting, in the onset, to 
decision — to think of him as calmly balancing 
and adjusting all that could be said before him in 
relation to the merits or the appearances of a case. 
I would rather have thought of him as at once 
seeing the right, and that the argument, in 'all 
beyond the presentation of facts, must have been 
restraint on his impatience. He looked the char- 
acter of a ruler, not bending to the impulses of 



142 WHO GOES THERE? 

the hour, but with the possession of constant 
power; and he, hke his son, never understood the 
figure second, as apphcable to himself. I do not, 
by any means, intend this as implying self-suffi- 
ciency or vanity, not at all, but self-reliance, — 
that way which seems to assert for itself unity, in- 
dependence, almost isolation. His high nature 
revolted at the tyranny of others. Perhaps he 
would have exercised it himself. Of that I cannot 
judge accurately. He could not abide General 
Jackson ; and it was as amusing as it was interest- 
ing to hear him, as I have done, at a public meet- 
ing, vehemently denounce the loss of self-control 
on the part of the President, and — lose his own. 

I saw him meet Erastus Root on the steps of the 
Capitol, when, in 1839, the vicissitudes of politics 
had brought them within the fold of one party. 
General Root w^as standing, I thought, rather 
awkwardly and embarrassed, and as if not quite 
certain what to do when Judge Spencer should 
come up to him. The Judge very quickly re- 
lieved him, for he walked on as stern and unswerv- 
ing and erect as if no truce of political exigency 
had united their long-severed political affinities. 

In 1840, a large political delegation of young 
and active men went from Ithaca to Owego, to 
attend a political meeting at the latter place. We 
had a new locomotive, which was of the most 



WHO GOES THERE f 143 

impulsive character, and its fondness for a rest 
every mile or two was remarkable. The Judge 
was with us, and excessively disturbed by the 
hindrances to our journey ; at all which I could 
not be impatient, for the engine was the effort of 
a most self-sacrificing enterprise to furnish ad- 
ditional ease to the traveller on that route. Of 
course there was nothing very extraordinary or 
improper in being greatly annoyed at a delayed 
journey ; but it impressed me as not quite in the 
dignity of one who had seen so much of life's real 
vexations. 

Yet, this must not be supposed to be in igno- 
rance of the fact, that Judge Spencer was a man 
thoroughly possessed of the courtesies of life. I 
have too strong memory of personal kindness to 
doubt this for a moment. 

In the National Convention of 1844, that nomi- 
nated Henry Clay to the Presidency, Judge 
Spencer nominated Mr. Frelinghuysen for the 
Vice-Presidency. He did it, for he willed it ; and 
his was that will which makes its own road through 
all obstacles. Mr. Frelinghuysen's nomination was 
a good one, but not a wise one. It is true, that 
whatever is good is wise ; but it is equally wisdom, 
where a choice of good is presented, to take that 
which is also best for the hour. If political man- 
agers, who are often really great men, would 



144 WHO GOES THERE? 

more frequently study Sir Christopher Wren's 
epitaph, it would be to them the signal light of 
success. 

When he died, solemn honors were given by 
the Legislature to a memory so worthy.' The 
Governor and all the officers of State, the Senate 
and the Assembly, gathered at the obsequies, and 
one of the old Judiciary, Judge Woodworth, — 
who had been the witness of all the career of 
Spencer, — was present. The services were held 
in the old St. Peter's. I remember that the group- 
ing of the scene at the funeral impressed me. 
There was James Kane, with his blue camlet cloak, 
the collar half up, his florid complexion, disarranged 
hair, listening — as that true-hearted gentleman 
always did — with the utmost attention ; the five 
clergymen, coming in mournful step up the aisle, 
as the organ moaned forth its notes of dirge. I 
find that I made a memorandum, at the time, that 
the Legislature behaved like gentlemen. I hope 
this was not so unusual in the history of the times 
as to have been exceptional. 

I have departed from my rule, in mentioning 
the name of Mr. Kane, for he was a private citi- 
zen ; but his were those rare qualities of the 
unvarying gentleman ; his association with the 
early mercantile history of the State had been so 
marked, — his companionship with, and knowledge 



WHO GOES THERE? 145 

of, the leading men of the State so thorough, 
that his name is not altogether out of place in a 
retrospect of the times. 

The roll of the really great men who were in 
the Convention of 1821, is a long and historical 
one. There, in that wonderful delegation of Co- 
lumbia County, was Van Ness. Of him the testi- 
mony is, that in intellect he was gigantic ; his 
sway over the heart irresistible. I have heard 
Mr. Joshua A. Spencer relate of his powers of 
conversation, that, in attendance at a circuit, when 
the lawyers were gathered at the ordinary tea- 
table of the tavern, — which in and on itself had 
nothing whatever to detain them at it, — such 
was the fascination of his talk, that they all lin- 
gered around him until the night passed away, 
and the morning sun surprised the intellectual 
revellers. Van Ness belonged to a family who 
took high mental rank, and in all the departments 
of public action made their names remembered for 
their talent. 

Not that they were in the Convention, but that 
amidst -the roll of the eloquent men of that period, 
they were eminent, I would like to have known 
something of Baent Gardinier and of Henry R. 
Storrs. The first has a traditional reputation of 
brilliancy, and the latter is of the first names in 
the legal annals of our State. I once asked Mr. 

10 



146 WHO GOES THERE f 

Tlmrlow Weed, whose opportunities of observa- 
tion and accuracy in those opportunities were un- 
equahed, who had impressed themselves upon his 
memory as the most eloquent men heard by him. 
He deliberated some time before he answered, and 
then said, *' John Duer and Henry R. Storrs ; " and 
it must have been that Mr. Storrs deserved this 
high tribute of praise. I have a personal mourn- 
ful association with his name. Some months before 
these pages were written, Mr. William Curtis 
Noyes, the graceful and distinguished counsellor, 
had arranged with me to join him in preparing a 
life of Mr. Storrs, especially in view of a journal 
or diary which Mr. Storrs had kept, and which 
was then to be in the care of Mr. Noyes. It has 
since been placed in the archives of the Buffalo 
Historical Society. 

Gardinier and Storrs blended the life of the 
lawyer with the statesman, having very ably 
filled congressional place ; and were both recognized 
as men to whom the impatient ear of Congress 
would give its rare attention. 

We lost power in the North when we ceased to 
have such men in our representation. Mr. Clay 
remembered well the career of Mr. Storrs, and in 
a visit to Western New York alluded to it. There 
was a gathering of talent in and about the County 
of Oneida, which left its impress on the policy 



WHO GOES THERE? 147 

and jurisprudence of the State for a long series 
of years ; and the list of those who from that 
home graced the capitol and the courts is a proud 
page in her annals. Before our volume is com- 
pleted, we shall find another name that, though 
brief in career, made even that brevity of life bril- 
liant and powerful. 

Mr. Storrs' great power as a debater made for 
him a reputation any man would have envied, for 
it is known that Mr. Clay said of him, — and that 
without the prompting of any leading question, — 
" that he was greatest in the House of Representa- 
tives of any man he had known. He had great 
power of reasoning, sufficiently rhetorical, but, 
above all, forcible, — of commanding person, of fine 
voice. He saw far ahead, — he saw too far ; all 
sides of a question presented themselves, and while 
the mass by his side accepted and were swayed 
by his reasoning, he left himself in doubt, and 
went on and went into doubt, and from that, his 
reasoning and his action dissevered." At the close 
of a speech, which brought the minds of men 
right to him, it was not at all certain that his own 
action would correspond to the word to which his 
reasoning, irresistible to others, had led them. He 
seemed not to know how to grasp power, after 
he had won it. Hence Mr. Clay may be excused 
for having added to his eulogy of Mr. Storrs, that, 



148 ^^0 GOES THERE ^ 

with his greatness, he wa5 also the most useless of 
all leading men. 

And this has its parallel in a class of men who 
speak to themselves, who, from thought and study 
and philosophical analysis of their own judgment, 
overlook the fact that the kingdom within us, how- 
ever all-important to ourselves, is, in truth, of 
very little interest to all exterior. An eminent 
debater in the State legislation of New York, Mr. 
Simmons, of Essex County, could reason well for 
hours ; and it was easy for him to do so. He was 
talking to the Areopagi that sat on the Mars Hill 
of his own studies ; but the power to reach other 
men was not his. I name him, for he was eminent 
as an abstract reasoner. Mr. Storrs, it is true, 
did influence others, and that greatly ; but they 
were tired of following a man, who did not follow 
himself. All over the earth, — for it is of the 
weakness of human kind, — men will follow most 
closely a leader who, in some degree, commands 
their allegiance. The degree may not safely go to 
that which is arbitrary, but it will only be effectual 
if it is decisive. We find Mr. Storrs' name rather 
in the lessee biographies for this, when his talent 
was such as to deserve a foremost place, if he had 
but gone where his bright and glowing words 
went. 

The controversies between the federal and 



WHO GOES THE RE f 149 

the democratic party occupied the thought and 
words of these gifted men. Time holds an in- 
verted telescope, and we see subjects of strife as 
much smaller, than they appeared to those who were 
actors at the hour. Mr. Hammond, in his politi- 
cal history, gives the formal and didactic account 
of these controversies, and the reason for them ; 
and although he was once so kind as to propose 
that I should write the continuation of his history, 
I am not to touch such themes, except as in illus- 
tration of more general history, in this volume. 
In the far-off look at the debates and arguments 
and addresses and resolutions and proceedings and 
celebrations, we see that our quiet ancestors blazed 
themselves into a great heat about the thesis of the 
hour. They drove quiet from their days, — perhaps 
very wisely, — that is, of the unsettled questions. 
It is amusing to look at the far-off indignation. 
The scowl of party violence almost darkened the 
thresholds of Mount Vernon, and as to all other 
households, it laid the very shadows of Egypt 
across some of them. I have before me a notice 
written by federals, of a celebration of the down- 
fall of Napoleon I., which is so vituperative of the 
democrats as to be ludicrous. It says : " The 
democrats surrounded the tavern (Washington 
Hall), with intent to commit the usual horrid dep- 
redations Concomitant with the nature of these 



150 fVHO GOES THERE f 

human monsters. The pohce had heen prepared 
in time, and when these savage orgies commenced 
their infernal pranks, they were arrested on the 
threshold of their pursuit, and were committed to 
prison, among whom were some of their first char- 
acters. The celebration of the day was held 
with cheerful harmony and enthusiasm, with a 
most able oration by the Hon. Governeur Morris." 
Such was the temper of the times. We can, in 
reading the above, better estimate the steady intel- 
lect of the orreat men who, amidst such storm of 
opinions, were masters of all that was winning and 
persuasive in human utterance. 




CHAPTER lY. 

FROM ERASTUS ROOT TO JOHN RANDOLPH. 

UT we return to the Convention of 1821, — 
for it was the full-dress party of the intellect 
of that period, — each county having exerted 
itself to send thither its wisest and worthiest. 
So, too, did Virginia gather in that day its 
noblest names to a similar Convention ; and 
when James Madison rose to speak, such 
was the crowd around him, that the reporter could 
find place for his duty only at his feet. 

I have alluded to the concentration of the intel- 
lect of the State at the Convention of 1821. 
This expression should be used in a more guarded 
form. A close review of the lists of that Conven- 
tion gives indeed a catalogue of many names, each 
of whom was eminent — some very eminent ; 
there are men not named there whose absence was 
severe loss to the State. There were few men 
better fitted to discuss questions of grave constitu- 
tional ethics than the younger (John C.) Spencer 
and Gulian C. Verplanck ; and it was ever to be 

151 



152 WHO GOES THERE! 

regretted that the occupancy of the Governor's 
chair deprived the Convention of the presence of 
De Witt Chnton. 

I do not see in that Convention that any one 
man ruled it. When I come to write, in pages 
following this, of the next constitutional gather- 
ing, — that of 1846, — I shall have but one record 
of fame to make there ; that was Michael Hoff- 
man's Convention, — certainly nothing less, per- 
haps nothing more. I can readily see that in 
Judge Spencer there was, in 1821, a man with all 
the will to rule ; but there rise other names there 
that would not consent to any such imperialism. 

Erastus Root was not a man to permit any large 
measure of contradiction or dictation. Mingling 
the roughness of pioneer life, of a semi-frontier 
experience, with a strong intellect, brighter than 
is his general reputation, he had such a vigorous 
will of his own, that he frequently bore down 
opposition without convincing It. His were the 
old ideas of radicalism, operating in some grandeur 
of theory, — waifs from the doctrines of the French 
revolution, — and he was in earnest. Hence, when, 
in after life, he found those doctrines used for self- 
ish and petty purposes, he found it an easy thing 
to be enrolled amono; conservative men ; though 
in such a rank, not as distinctive or as interesting. 

Certainly his earnestness did not forsake him ; 



WHO GOES THERE f 153 

for all wlio witnessed, as I did In part, his sena- 
torial career from 1840 to 1844, could not but be 
amazed at the physical force with which he spoke ; 
tearing his voice with a vehemence that only the 
stoutest frame of lung and throat could withstand ; 
and yet, with all this, there was a seml-sImpHcity of 
character and manner about him. Of course I 
allude now to his later days. I thought it a pic- 
ture for a photographist to see, as I did, this vet- 
eran statesman, — his white hair and glowing face, 
a velvet cap not ungracefully upon his head, — 
very earnestly playing chess with a young lady ; 
and quite absorbed in the game he was. 

Long years before that — when he was quite 
another man, and, I fear I may say, a rude man — 
I saw him In church rise during the sermon and 
turn his back to the preacher. Perhaps that was 
amono' the thinos allowed In the frontier habits to 
which he was accustomed ; perhaps it was to 
express his displeasure or weariness in something 
which the preacher uttered. It seemed rude enough, 
and I think wasf^at the time, the subject of com- 
ment. We have a general improvement of man- 
ners since that time. A man grieved or displeased 
may, in these days, be permitted to walk out of 
church, but, while in it, the law of society, as of 
right is, that he must be decorous and respectful. 

It was the good fortune of Erastus Root always 



154 WHO GOES THERE? 

to appear and reappear in public life at periods of 
the highest interest. Perhaps it was just then 
that the sense of his value of public service would 
strongest suggest itself to the memory of his fellow- 
men. He was, though filling the second place, 
the strong man of the Executive department of 
1822. He was in Conm-ess while Jefferson was 

o 

President, and while yet the storms of the last 
century had not subsided ; in the difficult period 
just before and just after the war of 1812, and in 
the era of the nullification of 1831 ; in the State 
Senate during the war of 1812, and forty years 
afterward ; while his service in the Assembly was 
scattered along from 1798 to 1830, knowing as 
many phases of party as Talleyrand knew of 
French governments. His life was a political 
kaleidoscope. 

He requested me at one time to present him to 
William Lyon Mackenzie, who was then in service 
at Albany, as a correspondent for one of the leading 
New York papers. I thought it a very curious 
and not uncongenial nor inappropriate meeting, for 
both of them had sought and found the wildest 
waves of political agitation. 

There could be somethino; of the imacrinative or 
poetical about his conversation. I recollect his 
using this figure, which I thought a beautiful one. 
Said he, " The mind of man is stronger after he 



WHO GOES THERE? 155 

has passed his prime of hfe than at that period ; 
just as the earth is warmer in the afternoon than 
when the sun is in the zenith." 

I attended th^ last day of the December term 
of the Court of Errors, in 1843, knowing that it 
was the completion of Erastus Root's service as of 
the Senate and Court, just for the purpose of 
watching the last official moment of a career so 
lengthened, — beginning in 1798, — then to end ; 
and the last vote he gave was on some question of 
authority of the Court, and he said " No ! " and 
as he was about to leave, said he, not exactly 
aloud, but, as it were, aside, " This closes my 
official labors for time and for eternity." I 
thought then it was rather sadly or reluctantly 
said. He had lived to see the fallacy of some of 
his earliest and strongest views. The Erie Canal 
was a national success ; yet the time had been 
when the batteau-men roared by every tavern-side 
on the Mohawk, at General Root's comical appli- 
cation to the river and the canal, of " The hole for 
the big cat and another hole for the little cat, too." 
A very different man — and not as eminent, 
but, in his line, distinguished — was Abraham Van 
Vechten, one of the Albany delegation in conven- 
tion. Recollection of him cannot be effiiced while 
that wonderfully accurate portrait of him is in ex- 
istence, which is one of the qrnaments of the 



156 WHO GOES THERE f 

room of the Court of Appeals in the Capitol. He 
looked, above all other men, the personification of 
the most respectable class of the old lawyer. 
There was worth and integrity iji his appearance 
that could not be mistaken. I cannot imagine a 
more pleasing, satisfactory picture than to see, as 
I have seen, this aged gentleman and counsellor 
sitting in the front door of his residence, or rather 
of his office, at Albany, in his old-fashioned, neat, 
and well-arranged costume, his Bible on his knee, 
with his long pipe in mouth, and all in the quiet 
appropriateness of one to whom this scene was of 
the fitness of things, and so understood and ac- 
cepted by all who passed. Albany had, what is so 
seldom presented to popular suffrage, the difficult 
choice between two most worthy men, each of 
them blended with the best recollections of an 
eventful period, when they had to select either 
John Tayler or Abraham Van Vechten as Presi- 
dential elector. 

Mr. Van Vechten was the synonyme in his 
locality for safe counsel, and others beyond his 
immediate neighborhood so adjudged him. Hence 
John Jacob Astor selected him as one of his coun- 
sel to obtain the 'title of the Putnam County land, 
whose romantic association with one of the early 
loves of Washington is narrated in a former chap- 
ter of this volume. Although the remark was not 



WHO GOES THERE'? 157 

entirely original with liim, yet it impressed me as 
concentrating a large truth, when, after the publi- 
cation of the Revised Statutes, he alluded to the 
difficulties of finding the new enactments. " If any 
one asks me," said he, " a question in common 
law, I shall be ashamed if I cannot give him an 
immediate answer ; if he asks me of the statute 
law, I shall be ashamed if I can." He could say 
a sententious thing very cleverly. I asked him, 
if he had ever been at the village of Ithaca. 
"Oh, yes," said he, *' all over it — in the Court 
of Chancery." 

Nathan Sanford was an adroit, able, over-man- 
nered man, making the lowest bow of any man 
of his time ; seeking the society of young men, 
and skilful to see who those were whom he should 
attach to his fortunes. He must have had all the 
success he could have desired, for he filled the hioh 
places of Chancellor and United States Senator. 
He seemed to me one of those statesmen who be- 
lieve in the necessity of adapting themselves to 
the ways of men as they were among them, even 
if the acquiescence be very insincere ; but those 
who knew him intimately, and yielded to his per- 
suasiveness, deemed him very able, while they, even 
in their allegiance to him, saw that his was a 
school of statesmen, which might have congenially 
included Mr. Burr. 



158 WHO GOES THERE? 

A western county sent to that Convention a 
young lawyer, then, as in all his long career of 
public honors, a most fortunate man. Judge Nel- 
son, then representing Cortland, was one of the 
two names which reappeared in the Convention 
of 1846. A dignified gentleman. Judge Nelson's 
success has been the gift of time to a most worthy 
recipient. We call some men fortunate, but good 
fortune is often only talent availing itself at once 
of opportunity. 

When John Duer died, there was no erasure 
from the roll of common men. The State of New 
York lost of those men who were of the chief among 
the mighty. As a judge of one of the courts of 
the city of New York, he had been withdrawn 
from public observation. Whatever of reasoning 
or ability accompanied his judicial life, by that he 
was least known. It was to John Duer as a 
counsellor, as a statesman, a man of profound and 
clear thought, that the public ear listened for long 
years. I have before alluded to his reputation 
for eloquence, as avouched by the highest author- 
ity. 

Mr. Duer believed in the wisdom that is founded 
upon "learning, — upon the close and arduous in- 
vestigation of the results at which the minds of 
the gifted of all ages have arrived. He came to 
study, as the epicurean comes to pleasure. General 



WHO GOES THERE f 159 

Wickham, of Goshen, told me that while he was, 
many years since, accompanying Mr. Duer, on 
one of the south-western circuits, they w^ere com- 
pelled to occupy at the tavern one room. The 
General, wisely believing that night was made for 
sleep, w^ent to rest. Just before falling asleep, he 
noticed his friend standing at the bookcase, with 
a volume in one hand and a candle in the other. 
The night passed, and the morning hour came, 
and when he looked for Mr. Duer, he was yet 
at the bookcase, the book still in his grasp, and 
the wasted, long-wicked candle flickering in its 
paleness in feeble contrast with the daylight. The 
reader had omitted sleep ; the mind had forgotten 
the body. 

Though of the old-fashioned school of men, in 
the forms of courtesy and in the tastes of asso- 
ciation, Mr. Duer was with his age 'always. He 
had no dimness of eye toward a vigorous progress. 
While the old wealth of classic learnino; was re- 
coined by his memory, that memory welcomed 
every new vein of thought. 

He was of the class of men that made the city 
of New York remembered by every intellectual 
visitor. Wit, learning, eloquence, did not die with 
him, but they were garments that wxre only put 
off by him, as the mortal puts on immortality. 

One of the greatest of the names of the Con- 



160 WHO GOES THERE ^ 

ventioii of 1821 remains, James Kent ; and I can 
only regret that It never was my good fortune to 
meet him. But of him, there was always a high 
and exalted public estimate, as of the great civilian 
of New York's history ; and the appearance of his 
Commentaries was recognized as the illumination 
of the law, shed over it by one of the brightest 
minds devoted to its science. It was an era in 
our annals, that is, of their best pages, when this 
great lawyer reached his eightieth year. All that 
was eminent in the Bar of New York, in all parts 
of the State, joined in the tribute of public hom- 
age. They said, — and it was truthfully said, — 
'' It is with the immortal Commentaries on the 
law of EnMand that those on American law are 
now classed, and the names of Blackstone and 
Kent are never hereafter to be disjoined." For- 
tunately for James Kent, his biography is even 
now in preparation by one who can fully appre- 
ciate, and admirably delineate, the career of a great 
leo;al mind. 

Rufus King brought to that Convention the 
sanction of his illustrious name, — a delegate from 
one of the Long Island counties ; for that section 
of the State could not see such an assemblage as 
a Constitutional Convention, without claiming to 
send thither its most illustrious name. 

It is to the honor of New York that it placed 



WHO GOES THERE? IGl 

Mr. King in the high trust of its first senatorial 
representation in the forming government of ithe 
United States, and by the side of PhiHp Schuyler, 
who was so thoroughly the representative of old 
New York. Mr. King had just come to New York 
from Massachusetts. It was a noble proof that 
this great State had no narrow or limited views of 
birthright to its honors. The blended citizenship 
was most appropriately represented by General 
Schuyler and Mr. King. 

I can imagine how historic Mr. King's presence 
in the Convention of 1821 must have been, as he 
had been a member of that greatest of all Con- 
ventions, that which framed the Constitution of 
the United States, and over which presided George 
Washington, who was, as Madame de Stael said 
of the Emperor Alexander, himself a constitution 
to his country. What respect must have awaited on 
his every movement, and with what deference to 
experience, gathered in schools of public service so 
distinguished, must his opinions have been re- 
ceived ! I can believe all the traditions of Rufus 
King's ability, because I have known his son, 
Charles King. 

Recently, Blackwood's Magazine contained an 
article on Harrow School, its history and its schol- 
ars ; and it was mentioned that two sons of the 
American Minister had received education there, 
11 



162 WHO GOES THERE f 

because, so the magazine said, that gentleman 
had believed, that at Harrow there was less atten- 
tion paid to the distinctions of rank. I doubt 
whether Rufus King, in giving to his sons, Charles 
and John A., the advantages of Harrow School, 
stopped to think about its rules or customs of 
deference to rank. They enjoyed its advantages 
themselves, like young gentlemen and the sons of 
a gentleman. It has been very interesting to me 
to hear their memories of boyish days when they 
met, in the equality of fellow-students, Byron, that 
greatest of poets, — but to whom the boys gave 
some ludicrous name for his lameness, and, for 
other causes, called him " the poor lord," — and 
Peel, so long the real ruler of England. These 
were associations which the future Governor of 
New York, the future eminent writer and scholar, 
do not forget ; and which form, indeed, only a 
brief chapter in their very interesting reminis- 
cence. 

George HI. did not fail to express his satisfac- 
tion that Mr. King, while visiting Paris, was not 
presented to Napoleon, — "To that man," as the 
English monarch said of the great ruler, " by the 
side of whose career, history fails to remember his 
own." He placed the American minister's reti- 
cence in acceptable contrast with the visiting of 
Napoleon by Mr. Fox ; and, in his quick, nervous 



WHO GOES THERE? 163 

manner of repetition, said, " You did not go to see 
that man. — Mr. Fox did, Mr. Fox did ! " 

Most of us think we could have ventured to 
incur the displeasure of most of the potentates of 
the earth, to have seen Napoleon. I recollect Mr. 
Gallatin expressing his regret that, in consequence 
of some mistaken delicacy, he did not see him 
while in Paris, during his service as Minister to 
England. 

The elder Adams and the younger Adams both 
sent Mr. King to the English court, and he saw 
that central arena of earth's influences while yet 
the great men of the last century's power were 
living, and in the day of the men who had suc- 
ceeded to them ; Pitt and Fox of the past, and 
Canning and Palmerston of the new men. It 
was the good fortune of Mr. King's sons to 
visit Charles James Fox, at his residence, and also 
to hear him in his place in Parliament ; and I 
have heard Mr. Charles King most interestingly 
describe the ease and quiet assurance of power 
with which Mr. Fox spoke, his hands reposing on 
his portly person. 

The name connected with the Conventions of 
New York, that lingered longest in life, was that 
of John Lansing, more familiarly known as Chan- 
cellor Lansing, who led the delegation from 
Albany to the Convention of 1788, and who I 



164 WHO GOES THERE? 

recollect making some motion in the Supreme 
Court not long before his sad disappearance from 
among the living, and which was objected to by a 
lawyer, as not consistent with the practice ; and 
the delicate and considerate manner in which the 
Judge — whose name, for that courtesy, I could 
wish to remember — said, as if deprecating the 
opposition, " Great allowance is to be made for the 
age of the counsel who has made the motion." I 
know I thought at the time it was a very kind 
scene. 

Chancellor Lansing, with Robert Yates, gave 
us our only glimpse of General Washingtoji's great 
Convention of 1788, — all or most of our knowl- 
edge of it, till the Madison papers were published. 
The Judge who was so courteous, as I have above 
related, was much more civil than John Sloss 
Hobart, one of the earliest of the judiciary, who, 
Judge Woodworth told me, quite sharply set Imn 
down, when, as a young man, he rose to address. 
'' Sit down, young man," said he; " nobody but a 
counsellor at law practises in my court ! " 

Those were days when the Bench dared to say, 
" This is my court ! " and between objecting to so 
much individuality of power, and '^ reforming " it, 
and regretting that we had reformed quite so 
much, the exact place of the judiciary has not 
quite settled itself to this day. 



^WHO GOES THERE 1 165 

Notwithstanding all that is said — and often 
truly said — of the dying out of old names and 
old families, yet one can trace through the series of 
the assemblages, when the leading men of the State 
have been called together, a type or group of the 
same families from the very colonial times — in- 
deed, into them. The Beekman and Schuyler and 
Clinton are familiar in 1860 as they were in 1710 
and 1719 and 1743 ; and we have sent to the 
highest place in our State and to the Senate of the 
United States a descendant of the greatly misun- 
derstood and misrepresented Stuyvesant of 1647. 
So our wheel of political power is not always in 
the guidance of new men. The name of Livings- 
ton has a lease of representation dating from the 
year 1777. 

John C. Spencer Was, emphatically, one of the 
first men in all the annals of New York, and, in- 
deed, of the nation ; and it would have been un- 
easiness to him to have thought his name in any 
other than the very first line of record ; and this 
not of vanity, but of the consciousness of self- 
reliance. He asked neither pioneer nor convoy in 
life ; and his influence was always on the pulse of 
the action around him. If a very difficult affair 
was to be disentangled ; if a very rending and 
racking problem of political doctrine was to be 
solved, men trod the very road of despair to go 



166 WHO GOES THERE? 

to liis office, to find its solution. Educated and 
brought up amidst that illustrious school of men 
who circled around his father, he rose from these 
influences and carried away from them their best. 
He took study by school, by college, by grasp on 
learning, and b}" experience of the world. He 
brought all this to his own mould, rejecting as 
promptly as tamer minds acquiesced — not behev- 
ing in failure, and not knowing fear. 

The career of Mr. Spencer was an isolated one. 
He was never known as the appendage to any 
man. He was careful of the official proprieties of 
life ; but it was true of him — I know not but 
more truly than of any other — that whoever ruled 
state or nation, did not rule him. He was of no 
man's clique . or cabal ; and the power that gov- 
erned, whether it was by political or official influ- 
ence, might, as it often did, find in him a 
counsellor, but it never curbed him into a vassal. 
What he believed, — his idea of the right, — he 
followed. Strong in his own elaborate examina- 
tion, if the strength of the popular opinion flowed 
with his own, it was well, and he could gracefully 
appreciate the support ; but if it deserted him, he 
did not desert his judgment. 

His life was a long array of service to others ; 
or, as it would best express the truth, of assists 
ance to others. At the bar, with the rich learning 



WBO GOES THERE? 167 

of a life-long student in the lore of the law, with 
an earnestness, a seriousness of utterance that 
compelled attention, he was heard bj the judges 
as one to neglect whose words would have been 
injustice to themselves ; and he could utter such 
terse and forcible sentences ! In the argument on 
the constitutionality of the canal revenue certifi- 
cate law, in 1851, in which his judgment coincided 
with that of Daniel Webster, and which he re- 
garded as one of the most important of all the 
case's in which he was ever enoao-ed, I recollect 
his warning to the court, lest too often or too arbi- 
trarily they should overrule or thrust aside the 
eifect and force of the will of the legislative branch 
of the government. " Take care," said he, " the 
bow, too often bent, breaks at last I " 

In the halls of legislation, he so forcibly, so 
faithfully asserted a principle, — or, perhaps, oftener 
combated a policy, — that, though it might be a 
minority of numbers with whom he acted, it 
soon became a majority of such might of argu- 
ment, that the great axiom of government became 
a reality in his case, " that power is always pass- 
ing from the many to the few." 

He held high cabinet office, and the annals of 
those eminent positions, the Treasury and the War 
Departments, testify of that inimitable energy, 
that command over all their resources, over all 



168 WHO GOES THERE f 

their affairs, which, in him, could only cease when 
the chill hand of death arrested the powers of life. 
His name went hefore the Senate of the United 
States, as Justice of the Supreme Court. It failed 
to receive their approval. That act deprived that 
Bench of the services of a man, before whose in- 
tellect and labor, learning and independence, the 
dust of decaying doubt would have been swept 
aside, and there would have been kept brilliant 
the illustrious record of Jay and Story and Mar« 
shall. 

When he was but a young man, he awoke a 
slumbering House of Representatives to all the 
errors of the financial institution of the nation, 
and severed and scattered every disguise which an 
infatuated secret organization had thrown around 
the terrible murder of a citizen. 

There was much of the true reformer about 
him. He knew the distinction that exists between 
the radical and the reformer, and, while he scorned 
the ephemera that flutter to destroy, he applied 
the noble intellect that lived within him to make 
order and beauty and simplicity and right to exist 
where old Time had accumulated mere form or 
precedent or confused or costly or cumbrous forms 
of action. 

If manuscript and type could speak, how many 
of the most important statutes of tlie land, how 



WHO GOES THERE f 160 

many grave resolutions, how many important re- 
ports, how many hicid essays, how many earnest 
editorials, uttered in the names, and issued under 
the apparent ownership of others, would be found 
in that neat, small, perpendicular handwriting, — 
that peculiar manuscript, so condensed, so like 
the work of a careful master of that gi-eat feather 
in the age's cap, the pen ! Labor — labor — this 
was the motto of his heraldry ; and he gave his 
tremendous energies to the work of life, — to be 
the first In whatever department of action that 
labor was exercised. 

It was said that he was stern and harsh. It 
may be so, but I know that his were strong and 
fervid sympathies and emotions. There was an 
hour when, In the affair of the Somers, affliction 
came upon him in its intense' and most bitter form. 
I have a letter of his before me, written at that 
time, in which he says : *' That my reason has 
been preserved to me, amidst this horrible calamity, 
is a source of profound gratitude." 

There was a great man in action and counsel 
while Mr. Spencer lived, and I could not observe 
his career without this record. 

With Luther B radish went out the last light 
of the last school of statesmen. In years life did 
not belong to it, and Is not to be classed among 
them; but he was, as It were, a legacy from them 



170 WHO GOES THERE? 

to teach us what a thorough and undeviating gen- 
tleman should do in all the dusty walks of political 
life. But, superb as his manners were, and not 
overwrought, when applied to the circumstances 
of a parliamentary career, he was something more 
and better — much more and better — than an ex- 
ample of courtesy. He filled only subordinate 
parts. He was member of Assembly, Speaker 
of the Assembly, Lieutenant-Governor, United 
States Treasurer ; but it was true of him, as it was 
said of a diplomat who was sent to some out-of-the- 
way station, and when it was remarked that his 
duties would scarcely amount to more than the 
sending one letter home in a year : " But," said 
his friend, '-'• liow ivell he sends home that one?^^ 
There was no more careful and attentive and up- 
right gentleman in all the House, speaking at the 
right time, for the right thing, and clearly and 
forcibly. As Speaker and as President of the 
Senate, it is a proverb of the Capitol, when any- 
thing is done admirably, that it is of the school of 
Luther Bradish. The nation knew, in its inmost 
heart of confidence, that its treasure was safe in 
his hands. Even the minor duties of life were 
done so well by him. I recollect seeing him,* as 
one*of the wardens of Grace Church, take the 
collection. He offered the plate with such graceful 
courtesy, as if he said to each one, " Will it, 



WHO GOES THERE f 171 

at this time, be agreeable to you to make me the 
bearer of your charities ? " In truth, he was a 
princely gentleman, and princes may be obliged 
to me for the comparison. He gave his dignified 
old age to the presidency of the noblest of all 
organizations, the American Bible Society ; and, 
in the fitness of things, lived worthily and well. In 
body and mind, till eighty years completed his 
record. A charming conversationist, he had mem- 
ories of the East, of Europe, of the best and 
greatest ; and to hear him and Henry Clay talk 
together, as I have done, was a page of human 
action worth a journeying to enjoy. 

.In a crowd of ten thousand men, Rufus Choate 
Would have been selected as possessing the look of 
a great man. There was a grave genius about it, 
which at once attracted. I saw him repeatedly, 
and first, I recollect, at a party at Boston, or 
rather a reception given to President Tyler, in 
1843, during the furore of the festival of the laying 
of the top-stone of the Bunker Hill Monument. 
The collector of the port, or some other official, 
had borrowed the house of a friend in which to 
entertain the President ; and in this crowd, Mr. 
Choate mingled, greatest of all. I heard him 
speak at the Baltimore presidential nominating 
convention, nine years after that, 1852, when he 
really wished to make one of his best speeches, 



172 WHO GOES THERE f 

and when all the physical circumstances around 
him were propitious for it, — were indeed enough 
to make vivid the words of any man. He was 
put forth as the leading man of those who, at that 
time, sought the nomination of Mr. Webster. 
Though not many in numbers, they were very 
energetic and very zealous. 1 would chronicle 
it as contribution toward the history of the 
times, how zealous and energetic and devoted 
these men were. They desired that, amidst the 
almost frantic excitement of that assemblage, some 
one should rise, who should place Mr. Webster's 
right in the strongest force of words, and they 
chose Mr. Choate. He had the personal fitness 
for such a scene. Tall and self-possessed, wi-th 
a commanding voice and impressive action, and 
all around him a crowd in earnest expectancy, 
either of progress toward triumph from what he 
should say, or of something to call forth earnest 
answer. 

Mr. Ashmun had just read a report which em- 
bodied a declaration of principles, and there werfe 
loud cries for Choate, and he rose. He spoke 
with eloquence, worthy of his reputation, and was 
heard with applause, which in itself was worthy 
reward of a life of exertion. It was a superb 
scene. The whole convention turned to the 
speaker. The galleries were thronged with an 



WHO GOES THERE? 173 

audience intently attentive, and the fervid language 
of the orator found its way to their hearts. With 
all his glowing eloquence, he was master of him- 
self; and such a man is usually master of his 
audience. 

Though it were perhaps better introduced in 
another place in this volume, I cannot omit a scene 
that at that time was witnessed. Forty miles 
thence, in a hotel at Washington, far away from 
his beautiful Ashland, Henry Clay was on his 
death-bed, close to his dying day. In his stirring, 
life he had often received ovations of praise for 
word and service, enough to wreath the richest 
laurel that ever fell on the head of man ; but 
never, in all his brilliant career, did brighter lustre 
shine on his iiame, than when Governor Jones 
pointed to his portrait, and the response was given, 
— such a response as seemed the concentration of 
the people's pulse of joy. 

I saw Mr. Choate when he was a member of 
the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, — a 
body which ought to have attracted to it the at- 
tention of all who have pleasure in an intellectual 
gathering, but which, as not including- Everett 
and other great names of Massachusetts, did not 
present a thorough representation. I recollect 
by what a weary staircase we found our way to 
the place of observation, — a long staircase with 



174 WHO GOES THERE? 

interminable succession of steps, with little, nar- 
row, inquisition-like ranges of seats. One ought 
to have heard the richest of language to compen- 
sate. Mr. Choate was not speaking, but listening. 
He did that well. He listened very attentively to 
Governor Marcus Morton, who was demonstrating 
that thereafter there ought to be no Council around 
the Governor of Massachusetts, but that he ought 
to stand alone. Doubtless his argument was good, 
but it failed to convince Mr. Choate, for, atten- 
tively as he listened, he voted against the ex- 
governor's proposition. Amidst that convention 
he sat, the man of mark. I doubt whether, in all 
the history of his life, as looked at from the close, 
he was fortunate or wise in havino; left the arena 
of the bar for that of the statesman^ In and about 
the law, in the practice of its highest tribunals, 
and the true argument of its greatest problems, he 
w^as creating, indeed had created, a name for him- 
self of the first celebrity ; and it would have been 
greater fame to have been recognized as head of 
the American lawyers, rather than to have been 
known as foremost friend even of Daniel Web- 
ster. 

In that very beautiful belt of land, which is 
about all that the State of New York has pre- 
served to the Indian, — a mere pathway by the 
forming waters of the Alleghany, — the man who 



WHO GOES THERE? 175 

best deserves record and remembrance was the old 
chief Blacksnake, a very unprepossessing name, 
and, in justice to the Indians, perhaps would sound 
better to us if we could but master the syllables, 
so short and disconnected, by which they knew 
him. He was a wonderful man, if only for his 
age ; for even in all the doubts of all great claims 
to longevity, it seemed in proof that he had passed 
the hundred by several years. Those three fig- 
ures of life ! How few see them, how very few 
see them, in possession of anything that gives life its 
value ! The greater part of those whose eyes be- 
hold the beauty of this world, see, before their age 
needs enumeration by more than one figure, the 
glories of a better. He was said to be more than 
one hundred and eight years old. I suspect it will 
be well to add the qualifying words, of a convey- 
ance ot real estate, " be the same more or less." 
His life connected the*majesty and misery of the 
Indians' history. He was a living man when, in 
these States, the Indian was a nation so powerful 
that its alliance was sought ; and, what was much 
more practical, its power was feared ; and that life 
lino-ered on till the Indian became a forgotten word 
of the white man — his estate a mere reserva- 
tion, — his existence dimly known to the people. 
He took part in the battle of Wyoming, — a battle, 
with its incidents, made immortal in the genius of 



176 WHO GOES THERE? 

Campbell, who had faint ideas of Indian or of Sus- 
quehanna Valley. 

Blacksnake was of singular beauty of form, and 
would have been the object of great attention, if 
he had gone beyond the limits of the land where 
was the home of his old age ; but he bore his re- 
tirement with dignity, and, of his people, he was 
almost as much alone as the pines in the modern 
forest. 

The Iroquois keep up the forms of their old con- 
federacy yet, though it is but the plaid of the clan. 
They have- their intricacies and policy, and the 
chief, the iVtoharho, must yet be of a particular 
tribe, and of a special family of that tribe. So the 
Henry IX., the last Stuart, without any other ap- 
pendage of a sovereignty, except a disputed title, 
and a pitying pension, believed himself the true 
king ; and amidst falling and failing races, some- 
thing of the old lives % make unhappy the 
obscurity of the present. Few men, peer or peas- 
ant, can divest themselves of the idea that some- 
thing of the past gives them worth, however 
unrecognized. 

A few Indians, known to me, had made the his- 
tory of their own people their study. Like as 
among the Jews, in their captivity, the memories 
of their brighter day lived and glowed amidst 
their bondage ; so do the traditions of the past 



WHO GOES THERE? 177 

dominion exist among the Iroquois ; and there are 
legends and narratives, not of course in books, — 
for what but the bark of the birgh tree was their 
papyrus? — but, as of old, uttered from the aged 
to the young, complete access to which these 
doubly intelligent men alone possessed. 

I once said to one of these gentlemen, — for, 
with all their life, they possessed the manners of 
gentlemen, — " I can understand what you, an 
educated man, do with yourself in the long winter 
evenings, for you can do just what we do, with 
books ; but what do your people, who are not edu- 
cated, as you are, do with themselves ? " '^ They," 
said he, " oh, they sit around the fire and tell 
stories." 

And this is type of the Oriental, — of all those 
who have social intercourse w^ithout books ; hence 
the vast majority of the history of the world, 
however little of it may reach us, is of and by, 
tradition. 

The most ludicrous instance of civilization 
among them that I noticed, was, while the pageant 
of the opening of the Erie Kailway was passing 
through the Reservation, to see an Indian in the 
sunshine with an umbrella over his head, — the 
delicacy of his complexion probably being in 
danger ! 

It is but a few years since one of these Indian 

12 



178 WHO GOES THERE f 

gentlemen indicated how well he could use the 
mystic, figurative language of his ancestry, by the 
following letter of invitation to an Indian gather- 
ing, which he sent to me : 

" My dear Friend, — The great A-to-har-ho, of the Onon- 
daga Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, has been here bear 
ing a wampum, which he directed me to send to the western 
door of the Long House. 

" The message wiiich the wampum bore was, that the 
Grand Sachem is about to take the ashes off the embers of 
the Council Fire of the Iroquois, and that each member of 
the Grand Council must watch the East, to see the smoke of 
the Council Fire as it first emerges from the tops of the 
forest. 

" Each ear must be listening daily in order to hear the 
footsteps of the next messenger, who will bring the string 
with the knots denoting the number of nights which shall 
supervene before the convocation of the Grand Council. 

" The Council will be held at the residence of the Keeper 
of the Council Fire at Onondaga. It will be held within a 
month, when all the wampums of the Iroquois Confederacy 
will be brought out, and the traditions repeated, according to 
the ancient customs of the confederacy." 

The day in which our lot is cast will not be dis- 
severed in personal association from the Indian, 
but it will see him only as one sees an old picture, 
torn and defaced and marred. Not that he was ever, 
except in few instances, the Roman " stoic of the 
woods," as he has been called. He was a man of 



WHO GOES THERE f 179 

few ideas, few resources. It was a theory of 
Henry R. Schoolcraft, who had made their his- 
tory his special study, that the Indian, residing 
amidst the recesses of the forest, believed in a 
special mythology of the woods, — not so much the 
Fan and Dryad, as some sterner deities or phan- 
toms ; and it was through fear of them that he 
was a silent man ; his vocabulary was limited by 
his dread of the unseen. 

I have had an Indian pour into my hearing, in 
low and musical voice, the tradition of the creation 
of the several tribes of the Iroquois, — the reve- 
lation that dispersed the original people, and their 
wanderings, — a blending of the wild and the gro- 
tesque, but, as of the ways of a decaying race, 
very interesting, — legends, in which incidents of 
a historical character, and the groundwork of 
which is adopted by us in our annals, mingled with 
stories that seemed childish even for the red man. 

I remember when, after some fierce outbreak in 
the then Far West, it was deemed politic, by the 
government, to show a delegation of the Menom- 
inees what the physical greatness and power of 
the Atlantic States was, and these men came 
down State street in a post-coach. They were 
powerful men, in a degree that gave us just idea 
of what their strength and force were in their pri- 
mal day. 



180 WHO GOES THERE f ^ 

John Miller, of Tmxton, an eminent physician, 
to whom I have before alluded, in that part of this 
volume illustrating Washington, told me that he 
was seated in the gallery of the House of Repre- 
sentatives, when his attention was given to the 
occurrence of a young person engaged in conver- 
sation with the Speaker. From his boyish look, 
he presumed him to be one of the pages of the 
House. The interview was a brief one, but it 
was historic in the annals of Congress. It was 
when John Randolph presented himself to take 
the constitutional oath of office, on being elected 
member of the House; and when the presiding 
officer asked him — of course, in pleasantry — 
whether he was of the age defined by the Consti- 
tution, and Randolph said, " Ask my constituents." 

The spectator of the scene long outlived the 
Virginian orator. What an orator ! He could talk 
for hours of nothing, and talk so well, so beau- 
tifully, that it poured over the memory as the 
quick, glittering water pours over the agate-strewn 
bed of Minnesota's streams, indicating the precious 
stone, but not bearing it on. He was of those who 
seemed, by instinct, to know the aftairs over whose 
elaborate workings other men must toil long before 
they obtain analysis — who was a cyclopaedia in 
knowledge — who had eye to see the beautiful and 
tongue to talk it. 



CHAPTER V 




FROM JOSIAH QUINCY TO tHOMAS MOORE. 

OME of the incidents I have narrated in 
these pages I gathered from the conversa- 
tion of Josiah Qiiincy, whose hfe extended 
from about 1772 to 1860. When he 
wrote in his old age, at a period when 
most men have their enermes taxed to 
keep their intellect together, the life of 
John Quincy Adams, I thought it was a question 
of doubt which was most interesting, the bioorra- 
phy or the biographer. He was of Boston when 
learning was a rare thing in the republic and yet 
found home in Harvard ; and when yet the old- 
fashioned families of thB colonial timeS moved on 
in brocaded form. Lord Lyndhurst's father, 
thought he had sold some lots in Beacon street too 
cheaply, and made inquiry afterward ; but Mr. 
Copley found that he had discovered the value of 
property in Boston too late. Had his earlier 
judgment been master of the situation, he would 
have been richer for his old estate in the " rebel- 

(181) 



182 WHO GOES THERE f 

lious Town of Boston." Lord Lyndhurst and 
Mr. Quincy — associates in childhood — saw the 
great volume of life and history open its strongest 
pages. 

When Josiah Quincy was in Congress, the day 
of fierce conflict of principle was in zenith fervor, 
and he walked in the heat without a shade. They 
who took the power knew his strength, whether 
the blow was on their armor or for their cause. 
For him to write the history of such a statesman 
as was Mr. Adams, was as if Rossini should write 
the history of Music. I once saw Mr. Quincy 
standing by the base of Franklin's statue, and 
washed a photographist had turned the gaze of the 
sun where my own was. 

The last public address I heard from him was 
in that grand gathering of intellectual men, which 
made so memorable the Triennial Meeting of the 
Alumni of Harvard College in 1858. I cannot for- 
get it. Mr. Winthrop presided ; at his side was 
Mr. Quincy, Lord Napier, -the then Minister from 
England, Edward Everett, Charles King, Motley, 
the historian, Felton, the man to whom Harvard 
entrusted safely its classics, Mr. Holmes, and a 
long line of agreeable and remarkable people. 

Far advanced beyond the fourscore which our 
years reach only by reason of strength, Mr. Quincy 
was not merely by his former association with the 



WHO GOES THERE? 183 

college, but by the great fact of his mental and 
physical power, the most remarkable of all that 
rare group, and his speech was worthy of the 
event. I know that in its sequence he gave me 
the opportunity of proving, what indeed I had 
not then for the first time to learn, the readiness 
of Mr. Everett, in the immediate answer or adapta- 
tion to a quick call upon him, for reply. Mr. 
Quincy alluded to the interesting recollection that 
sixty years before that day, wdien, said he, the 
orator who has so deliglited you this morning 
(Mr. Everett had made the great College address 
of the Commencement), was but three years old ; 
he (Mr. Q.), had in that hall pronounced a dis- 
course. When, a brief period afterward, Mr. Ev- 
erett rose to speak, said he, " My age has been 
somewhat suddenly alluded to by the venerable 
Ex-President of the College, while he was telling 
you that sixty years had elapsed since his address 
was here spoken. Now I wish to say to him and 
to you, gentlemen, that the only reason why I was 
not in this hall to hear that address, was because I 
was but three years old." 

On this occasion (1858), it seemed to me that 
it would be difficult, anywhere else in America, to 
have gathered such a collection of men whose 
spoken or written words, had made greater im- 
pression on the age in which they lived. Mr. 



*ms 



184 WHO GOES THEME? 

Quincy's rising was met by an unrestrained, almost 
boisterous, welcome from the crowd of educated 
men who filled the hall. They were moved, 
swaved, delighted, instructed, counselled, by the 
clear and wise words the aged man uttered. We 
felt as if the great Past had arisen from its ashes 
into its old fire. 

I saw Mr. Quincy last, at one of the earlier 
meetings of the Union Club of Boston, in De- 
cember, 1863. On entering the rooms in the 
house which was formerly the residence of Abbott 
Lawrence, the first and most interesting group 1 
witnessed was that of Mr. Quincy, looking very 
aged and infirm, in conversation with Mr. Everett. 
He was the object of the most affectionate respect 
by all gathered there, and as he slowly and almost 
painfiilly walked into the supper-room, it was evi- 
dent that we saw the closino; shadows of that lono; 
and memorable life. 

And this man, so much a man of skill in words and 
. literature, which are not supposed to be especially 
in alliance with the practical, added very largely 
to his fortune by his sagacity and financial courage ; 
by seeing what others did not or would not see, 
and by taking a risk from which others turned, and 
about which they made warning, after he was 
eighty years of age ! Had he not abundant other 
material about him for a good and true fame, this 



WHO. GOES THERE? 185 

would win the world's attention. I knew another 
gentleman In another citj, a private citizen, who 
lost a large fortune after he had arrived at the 
same far advanced period of life, and who took his 
loss calmly. It went beyond the hundred thou- 
sand, and had every possible circumstance of an- 
noyance except the one great fact that his integrity 
was not questioned. He lived to see himself again 
classed among wealthy men. After eighty years 
of age, how few there are that would meet quietly 
great gain or loss. It illustrates the comparative 
longevity of ancient and modern times, that It Is at 
this very age — fourscore — that Barzillai excused 
himself from acceptance of King David's welcome 
to the court at Jerusalem, by declaring that with 
him the senses had refused to recoo;nize or know the 
touch of luxury or the voice of harmony. 

The great age of Mr. Quincy, with his known 
association with the councils of the nation at such 
remote period, made him, I think, at his death, the 
most remarkable of all our public men. We hear ^, 
of such aged public men in England, but find very 
few of them in our own land of greater frost and 
hotter sun. 

Henry Clay, of all men In whose pathway in 
hfe I ever found myself, I saw so often, heard in 
such variety of speech and conversation, that I 
find in my own reminiscence that which, if it 



186 WHO GOES THERE* 

should not interest my readers, has been to myself 
a deiio'ht in its reawakeuino;. He was so dis- 
tinctly the leader of men, wherever he went, what- 
ever he did, — so broadly and boldly did it show 
itself, so vivid was he as he moved, and so fascinat- 
ing as he talked, so potent as he spoke, — that we 
all saw at once that,, while he belonged to us in 
the birthright of country, he would have been, in 
any country of civilization, of its masters ; and all 
this he possessed, all this he displayed, and it stood 
out from him, while he was almost at all times the 
political head but of a minority of the people. It 
was the supremacy of the individual, of the man in 
and of himself, — not accretino; to himself station, 
but something which, now that we look at in the 
results of the years, we can see was more enduring 
than any station. His name is of the household 
names of the nation, while it is sometimes neces- 
sary to refresh our memory by the aid of statistics 
as to the roll of Presidents ; yet he, with all his 
greatness, never saw that. He could not, or 
would not, see that the enthusiastic, the disinter- 
ested friendship, the loyalty shown toward him, 
was greater honor, greater reward than the certifi- 
cate of Electoral Colleges. 

I first saw Mr. Clay when he was on a tour 
tlu'ough Western New York, and when he made a 
brief stay at Auburn. That lie would probably be 



WHO GOES THERE? 187 

there on the day named, had been communicated 
tar and wide, and those hurried thither who could. 
It was in the time of the coaches of Slierwood, and 
the supremacy of turnpikes. The cortege moved 
slowly, as w.e should read the word slow at this 
day, though in its own time quite surely and with 
progress. An enthusiastic procession, self-arranged, 
of men devoted to him, were at his side, having 
adhered to him in his welcomings at the line of 
villages through which he had passed. It was 
a hot day, and the dust had risen to look at the 
orator. With all that could be done by the best- 
hearted and most liberal friends, it was yet a toil- 
some ride. But to hear and see him, that crowd 
had come; and giving him, as I thought, brief 
respite to get rid of the choking dust, he was called 
to a staging erected at the American Hotel ; and 
then I first saw him, tall, not graceful (except 
when the mamc of his voice had won you to be- 
lieve no man else could be as graceful), hard in 
features, but with a look and way that at once re- 
vealed the man that knew no superior. 

He seemed to have had no time given him for 
preparation to speak. Indeed, it seems to me now 
as if the dust was on him. He was formally and 
rather ponderously addressed by a leading citizen 
of Auburn (Mr. Bronson), and Mr. Clay lis- 
tened with all dignity and orderly patience ; the 



1S8 WHO GOES THERE f 

crowd would have preferred brevity. He replied 
ever so admirably. Though this was but a way- 
side, unstudied speech, it is not forgotten to this 
day, and some of his gestures were themes of 
especial admiration. Of course his address was, 
after pleasant words of gratitude for the welcome 
given him, concerning the prevalent political 
themes, and therefore evanescent, but at the hour 
it made the deepest impression. He dehneated 
the discipline wdth which the party opposed to him 
moved. '' At the word of command, if need be," 
said he, " they ground their arms ; " and here he 
dropped his hat, which he had held in hand. 
Of course, how" this hat was to be recovered by 
him, without some very awdvward movement, by a 
man so tall, was to all of us an object of special 
wonder ; but in the same figure, and in the delin- 
eation of some other process in the movement of a 
thoroughly ordered army, his long arm swept 
gracefully down, and in the fitness of the words 
used, so that it seemed precisely appropriate, the hat 
was regained. That occasion rejoiced the whole 
country around, and is yet memorable. Soon after, 
he w^ent to the belvidere on the top of the American, 
from whence the view is of a large area of wealthy 
and well-cultured land. He enjoyed this. Just about 
that time, the leading topic of political conversation 
was the speech of Wm. C. Rives, of Virginia, who 



WHO GOES THERE f 189 

had spoken somewhat laudatory of his (Mr. Rives') 
farm of five thousand acres, at Castle Hill. Mr. 
Clay, looking somewhat disdainfully, making the 
gesture, in him always so expressive, — the stretch- 
ing out his arm, — said, as he looked at the beauti- 
ful farms that lay almost beneath him, " I would 
not give one thousand acres of this land for all his 
five thousand at Castle Hill.'' 

He seemed to me, as I saw him alone, not ani- 
mated. It may have been the fatigue, or it may 
have been of his characteristic, to illuminate only 
under the influence of numbers around him. His 
use of snuflt' seemed to me immoderate. Since 
Scott, in that delightful book, the Pirate, makes 
the poet of Burgh Weston, Claud Halcro, to re- 
joice, as a choice reminiscence, that he filled the 
snuffbox of " glorious John Dryden," I am not 
sure but that a similar service to the statesman is 
*' not to be sneezed at." 

In the evening a reception was given him at the 
residence of Governor Seward, and there he was in 
high state of animation, delighting men as he ever 
did. I recollect one remarkable expression which 
he used. He was alluding to one of the occasions 
on which his name had been in the Presidential can- 
vass. " I received," said he, " a tremendous defeat ; 
but my measures, my measures all triumphed ! " 

I believe I next saw him at Albany, in the City 



190 WHO GOES THERE f 

Hall, addressing the young men, and acknowledg- 
ing the gift of a superb blue cloth cloak, which be- 
came his form admirably. I remember the exulta- 
tion with which the man who made it stood by and 
saw the affair. I am sorry to have to record tliat 
that superb garment was stolen from Mr. Clay a 
few days afterward; a circumstance which, I think, 
he ought to have considered as, at least, among the 
lesser griefs of his chequered destinies. 

Years passed on, and he had been candidate 
for the Presidency in 1844, — a year whose history 
might be written, a most interesting chapter in our 
pohtical annals. That is not for this volume. 
Suffice it to say, that it was distinguished by a 
personal devotion never before given in this coun- 
try to any man, and never since — losing the char- 
acteristics of a political adherence in the grander, 
though perhaps less sagacious, attributes of loyal 
fidelity. More n^en worked and voted for Mr. 
Clay in that year disinterestedly^ — just because 
they were for him above and outside of all other 
considerations, — than the annals of this country 
record in case of any other man. It was a personal 
attachment, as intense as that of the Highlanders 
to Prince Charlie. 

But all this is out of the intent of this work. 
He had grown older, and vicissitudes had left their 
mark upon his frame ; but when he entered Syra- 



WHO GOES THERE? 191 

cuse, a guest of the New York State Agricultural 
Society, the grand old man was in ^11 his individ- 
ual power over all around him. And all over the 
State, the attraction of travel toward the State 
Fah* became potent, as the word spread every- 
where that Henry Clay was to be there. His name 
had, as the old Scotch ballad sings, " music in it." 

Mr. Clay's reception at the State Agricultural 
Fair held at Syracuse, in 1849, was of those chap- 
ters in life which he who reads cannot forget, nor 
is this forgotten. It is the chosen, cherished recol- 
lection of many hearts, for it combined the inci- 
dents of a widely enthusiastic welcome unto one 
who, though he held neither station nor power, 
was regarded by all as worthy of all they could 
do or could say for him and to him. No vision of 
future gift or grant or place gilded this reception. 
It was the Americanization of the loyalty which in 
other days and countries clung around the Stuart — - 
was faithful to the death to name and lineage. 

Syracuse, a busy and advancing city, reversing 
the fate that befell the disobedient wife of old time, 
turning itself from salt to life, was thronged ; rail 
and road and canal had exhausted all their facili- 
ties in bringing together the people, from the hour 
that it was known Henry Clay was to be there. 
He had been specially invited by the officers of 
the society, at whose head were John A. King, 



192 WHO GOES THERE? 

afterward Governor of the State, and Benjamin 
P. Johnson, the man who, beyond all others, has 
rendered higliest service to the agriculture of the 
country. Mr. Clay had accepted the invitation, 
and playfully remarked, as he consented, " I shall 
be the biggest ox on the ground." 

The Fair soon -became the picture of the one 
man and of the crowd, — of a vast mass of intelli- 
gent, independent men, giving themselves gladly 
to the watch around him, to cheer him, to talk of 
him, to rally around him, and in their own good- 
hearted, enthusiastic way, utterly to defeat all his 
purposes of looking at the incidents and collections 
of the Fair. It was the welcome of rural New 
York to Henry Clay, and all else was forgotten : 
all else remembered was blended in some way with 
that. 

His arrival was the sireat event of the dav. The 
station was circled by a crowd whose enthusiasm, 
when he did come, would heed no restraint. The 
barouche, in which he was conveyed to the home 
prepared for him, could with difficulty find way ; 
the stirring, energetic voice of Governor King was 
exerted to make itself heard in the tumult, as he 
begged them to give a road for the gallant Harry. 
I so well recollect this scene. Mr. Clay was of all 
men most fitted for such incidents, for- he had a 
word of kindness or courtesy or wit for all. 



WHO GOES THESE? 193 

It was in vain for him to attempt a careful scru- 
tiny of the exhibition. The crowd allowed no 
such thing. They massed around him, and wher- 
ever he went, it was their most sovereign pleasure 
to accompany him. From tent to tent, from 
sheep to oxen, from implement to picture, if Mr. 
Clay desired to see, that desire must yield to the 
greater, of being seen. I recollect being near him 
as a daguerreotype of himself (for the advance to 
photography was not yet) was brought out to the 
carriage and shown to him. Instantly he saw it 
he said, so wittily, " Horribly like me ! " Every- 
w^here in the street, or in the Fair grounds, was 
this enthusiasm shown, till I heard him say, "Well, 
gentlemen, let us go home ; we can do that, when 
we can do nothino; else." 

At his lodging, it was necessary, in regard to his 
peace, and in reference to preserving him un- 
harmed amidst the storm of kindness,* to establish 
a friendly quarantine, and not to permit an indis- 
criminate entrance. The claims for a special in- 
terview were sometimes touching in their devotion. 
Men who hved afar off, and in districts where the 
vast preponderance of pohtical opinion had been 
always against Mr. Clay, and they alone had kept 
his flag flying, — such men begged that they might 
go in to see him ; for it was to see him that their 
journey had been made, and to speak with him 



194 WHO GOES THERE? 

was the reward of a lifetime. They were admitted, 
and they were recompensed. 

Mr. Webster once said, " I would like to know 
what sort of people are your people of Western 
New York, that they are so devoted to Mr. Clay ? " 

But this crowd would not be content with see- 
ing him. They 7nust hear that voice, whose music 
had been the harmony of the nation in a career of 
eloquence. They were determined to hear him 
speak, and so they besieged the doors, blocked up 
the windows, kept all the fresh air out, until some 
of . his considerate and merciful friends su^-s^ested 
that he should satisfy the desire of the people by a 
bripf address. He proceeded to the north balcony 
of the Syracuse House ; and around the house the 
eager crowd gathered itself, wildly welcoming the 
grand old man as he stepped in front,and, with the 
already kindling eye, looked out on the multitude 
of friends — yes of friends. He had no office to 
give, no place to promise. He was never to be 
anything more or higher than he had been. The 
welcome to him was to the powerless, but it wf(S 
the proudest that could form the voice of fame. I 
recollect at the- time being delio-hted with the 
speech, as up to his reputation. Indeed, in my 
experience of his oratory, I think that was of the 
most attractive. He alluded to his being an old 
man, gray-headed, worn out. But when he said 



WHO GOES THERE? 195 

that, the crowd denied : " No, no ! you are good 
for fifty years yet." He said (I do not beHeve he 
meant this) that he had hoped to have paissed 
through the State quietly, unobserved, unrecog- 
nized ; and here again the cry met him, '' You 
can never do that." 

Said he : " When I go back to Kentucky, I ex- 
pect to attend an agricultural fair there. My 
friends will crowd around me, and they will say to 
me, ' O Mr. Clay, you have been at the great 
State Fair of New York. Come, tell us all about 
it, — tell us of the Devons, and the Durhams, and 
the Herefords.' And I shall tell them, ' I saw no 
Devon, I saw no Durham, no Hereford. I saw 
nothing ' " — and here he used that great circle 
of a gesture, which only his arm could effect in 
grace, — " ' I saw nothing but the people.'' " 

All this was a scene not to be obliterated. The 
young city would be reluctant to lose it from its 
annals. It left its traces in the memories of men, 
who, to this hour, as they will to their latest, pre- 
serve it, as the owner of precious stones his treas- 
ures. 

The city was more than crowded. It was over- 
flowing, — it was saturate with people. All the 
devices of remunerated entertainment and gener- 
ous hospitality were poured forth. In Mr. Clay's 
suite were the Vice President, Mr. Filmore, Gov- 



196 WEO GOES THERE? 

ernor Hamilton Fish, Mr. King, Mr. Granger, the 
brave old soldier, Solomon Van Rensselaer, all 
exulting in the welcome given to their chief. 

Some of my readers may say to themselves, " Is 
this warm portraiture of the progress of Mr. Clay 
real, or is it colored by a partisan feeling ? " I 
think I can answer them, that I have written this 
historically, in the wish to convey, if I can, a just 
idea of the feeling that existed toward this ex- 
traordinary man. His personal fascination was 
irresistible. Faults, deep and grievous, he indeed 
had. His life had written lines, which, dying, he 
might wish to blot. There were fractures and 
flaws in the line of light. To my thought, it was 
always painful that Mr. Clay did not hear the 
clarion sound of his own fame ; that it was far 
above the temporary shout to the political victor 
of the day ; that to him was accorded the greatest 
of all rewards, — the disinterested love of men. 

Well, if the people of Western New York 
were, as Mr. Webster thought, strangely attached 
to Mr. Clay, let us palliate it by the reflection that 
he wielded over all men authority by a power, 
which is a gift so rarely bestowed upon men, that 
its record comes to us in history only as the illu- 
minated letter in the missal, at the head of chap- 
ters, and those chapters do but symbolize centuries, 
Kemember, too, that Mr. Clay possessed the gla- 



WHO GOES THERE? 197 

mour, not only in the public address, glowing and 
glittering in the light of an admiring audience, 
but in his conversation, in that way by which he 
took the hearts of men, even while their judgment 
refused to go with their hearts. Even analyzed, 
true feeling will not grow cold. Governor Seward 
admirably said that Mr. Clay held the key which 
fitted the wards of every man's heart. 

But whoever wished not to be fascinated by Mr. 
Clay must not have encountered him in the brill- 
iancy of social intercourse. There he was of that 
rarest class of men, whose conversation is a de- 
light, and yet Mr. Clay was not a learned or ac- 
complished man. He could not quote the classics 
in correctness. He knew so little of music, that 
when, at the ratification of the Treaty of 1814—15, 
the authorities at Ghent wished to serenade the 
American Commissioners by their national air, the 
application for its score was made in vain both to 
Mr. Clay and Mr. Adams, and all that enabled 
the band of the Flemish city to acquit themselves 
successfully in Yankee Doodle was that Mr. 
Clay's colored servant whistled it for the leader. 

But Mr. Clay had something in conversation 
that was in the place of study and of music, — he 
had the indescribable manner that at once enthralled. 
It was the glamour of his way, — it was fascination. 

Mr. Phoenix of New York, then residing in one 



198 WHO GOES THERE? 

of the houses near the Battery, gave Mr. Clay a 
superb entertainment. It was, I beheve, in the 
very last visit whicii he ever made to New York. 
The dinner-party included Governor Bradish, Dr. 
Wainwright, and other gentlemen, with a brilliant 
representation of ladies. 

Mr. Clay entered the drawing-room with a pres- 
ence that at once attracted every one to his obser- 
vation. A tall, old man, in the years near the 
threescore and ten, his step and tread was like that 
of a sovereign. He came in with an impressive 
manner that would, in another man, have been 
sensational. In him, it was so graceful in all its 
grandeur, that it gratified while it absorbed us ; 
and, from that moment to the hour when he took 
his leave, no one but himself was in the thought 
or attention of all. He had no rival, not even with 
the very agreeable young ladies who were present, 
and who, with just appreciation, found, of all men, 
this homely old man the most delightful. 

Yes, this homely old man, — for the physical 
features of Mr. Clay's face were hard and forbid- 
ding, but the picture needed only the light to 
reveal it. His thought and word soon made that 
face the one to which all concentrated gaze. 

He was in admirable spirits, talked with ani- 
mation, illustrated whatever subject was presented 
to him, and enjoyed everything, pleasantly par- 



WHO GOES THERE f 199 

ticipating in the abundant liospitallty, and at the 
close of the dinner complimenting his host as only 
Mr. Clay could have done. The day previous he 
had dined with Stephen Whitney. " Mr. Phoenix," 
said he, " when I think of this superb dinner you 
have given me to-day, and tlie equally elegant 
dinner I enjoyed with Mr. Whitney yesterday, I 
am not sure, sir, but that it is my duty immedi- 
ately I take my seat at Washington to propose a 
sumptuary law." 

He seemed to take it very kindly that one of the 
guests had recently read and remembered an ar- 
gument he had made in the Supreme Court of the 
United States, and would at intervals allude to it 
in the course of the evening. Probably he be- 
lieved it was only his political speeches that men 
w^ould read. 

I recollect Mr. Bradish asked him who was the 
Henry Adams, whose name appears with the other 
British commissioners, at Ghent. " Oh, Henry 
Adams," said he, '' he was a dry equity lawyer." 

He considered Earl Gray fo have been the most 
eloquent man whom he heard in the English debates. 

But it is not by fragments of his conversation 
that I remember that occasion so well. It was the 
one pervading effect of his irresistible manner, — 
'not at all guarded, nor yet boisterous, but with 
such heartiness, such strength all the while, and 



200 WffO GOES THERE? 

SO utterly different from that of all other men, — 
that liis influence became a stream which like the 
fairy view impelled you to go with it ; and while 
I do not recollect all tliat he said, the effect was 
too vivid to pale with the retreating years. . 

And he could keep up this brilliant festive way. 
Returning from the dinner, he went to the house 
whose hospitalities had been offered to and ac- 
cepted by him, the residence of Egbert Benson, 
in Warren street, — a thoroughfare not then, as 
now, devoted to business. Here it had been ar- 
ranged to give to him a serenade, and accordingly 
in a short time a great crowd of gentlemen, with 
one of the selected bands of New York, were 
gathered around the door. If a great crowd in 
the night in the streets of a city is a mob, then 
never has New York seen so selected a mob. It 
was his eager, anxious, devoted friends, and he 
had neither place nor office to bestow. Mr. Ull- 
man was the master of the ceremony, and he con- 
jured the crowd to be calm. " Have patience, gen- 
tlemen,^' said he, " have patience, and you shall 
see the idol of your souls." Meanwhile, amidst the 
darkness, but a few lights shone, — for there was 
none of the sensational accompaniments of pyro- 
techny, — the music so exquisitely played, the air 
we all knew so well in 1844, — " Here's to you, 
Harry Clay ; " after some time the hall-door 



WHO GOES THERE f 201 

opened, and with friends at his side, holding large 
astral lamps, so that he could be distinctly and 
most picturesquely seen, Mr. Clay advanced, and 
tlien the almost midnight air rung with the cheers 
of heart-mven voice. The acknowledo;ment was 
rapturously received. When he paused, there were 
cries for him to proceed. " You cry, go on," said 
he ; " that is easy for you to say, but where am I 
to get the ammunition ? " All these words, it may 
be, look tame enough on paper, but in that scene, 
said as he said them, and heard as we heard them, 
they were electric. That sweet serenade ceased, 
and the gratified gentlemen dispersed, and I be- 
lieve as Mr. Clay's form faded into the hall, it 
was the last I ever saw of that wonderful man, to 
whom above all others I felt what must be meant 
by the word, loyalty, — the willingness to do all 
for him with only the reward of the pleasure of 
having so done. When next I was near him, it 
was when- he w^as a dying man at a hotel in Wash- 
ington. President he never was, but Ruler he 
always was. 

Several years after Mr. Clay died, I found, being 
at Cincinnati, that the completion of the Coving- 
ton and Lexington railroad placed within the easy 
control of a few hours' journey, Lexington, a 
city near which most of the private life of Mr. 
Clay had been passed, and which will ever remain 



202 WHO GOES THERE f 

of the deepest interest to every one who is grate- 
ful that his country produced such a man, and^ 
most of all to those whose best energies were given 
to his fortunes, and who feel that the hour which 
took him from the field of politics removed the 
only man that in this century possessed the per- 
sonal, disinterested love of a great number of the 
American people, — a joy in him, which was to 
him a devotion, the like to which none other man 
on this side the Atlantic ever woke in the people. 
Lexington, as containing in its vicinage Ashland, 
would have been fit pilgrimage, even in the days 
of coach and turnpike, — how much more now 
when the car, with the comfort of a parlor and the 
speed of a bird, is the transit ! 

To reach the Covington Road is the difficulty 
and the dilemma of the journey. Snugly as to 
the appearance, the streets of Cincinnati and Cov- 
ington fit each other, when one comes to test the 
union of these lines, the deep valley of the river 
changes the affair materially. To accommodate 
this fluctuating Ohio River, • — this alternation of a 
deep deluge and moist sand, — the broad inclined 
plane remains without any line of street. The 
descending omnibus was shaken and tossed, and 
quivering on the line of balance that tested the 
tenure of the four wheels, its passengers found the 
passage a very rough one, and we listened kindly 



WHO GOES THERE? 203 

and approvingly to the promises of a suspension 
bridge, which should end all such adventurous, 
climbings. 

Tlie road once gained, brought us safely and easily 
and smoothly through a rich country, to the stead- 
fast, solid, and respectable old city of Lexington, so 
called because the companions of- Daniel Boone 
heard in their far-off wilderness exploration of the 
eventful hour which at the Lexington of Massa- 
chusetts opened the great gate of modern progress. 

We saw Kentucky field and forest, — the former 
glowing in a depth and richness of verdure that 
seemed the very gala day of the spring, and the 
latter in a glory of great trees, each in its own 
strength and height, scattered in such varied beauty 
of position as would have thrilled Downing's heart, 
and each as clear of underbrush as thouMi the 
forest had been the park. 

At Lexington we drove to the Phoenix hotel, 
and at its portal the landlord met us like a stout 
host of the olden time. 

" We reached the hall-door where the charger stood near." 

He was there to welcome us, and in a way of 
hearty, genial manner, that had associations of the 
Tabard and of Chaucer. We soon made arrange- 
ment for going to the place which was the heart 
of our journey, Ashland. We found Lexington 



204 WHO GOES THERE f 

old-fashioned and rather quiet, but with a look of 
good order. It was soon passed through, and a 
ride of about a mile brought us to the place, which 
at least, while this generation remains, will be a 
household word. I did not expect to find Ash- 
land so near the city. I thought that Mr. Clay 
when he spoke gf his neighbors in the city of Lex- 
ington, took the word in the large-spaced sense, 
in which rural gentlemen speak of those who 
live in their vicinage. The pleasant old city may, 
in the changing fortunes of time, decay and fade, 
but its suburb secures it a place in history. The 
landlord told us that it was Mr. Clay's invaria- 
ble practice to go home from the city at twelve 
o'clock. 

Our carriage was driven up a short avenue, and 
as we alighted, there was an immediate contest of 
feeling between the practical and the thoughtful. 
The old house, the Ashland, as it was the resi- 
dence of the home-life of Henry Clay, was gone. 
A new, well-built, handsome mansion was in its 
place, — and that of itself anywhere would be 
attractive. It had the plan, the outside look, the 
form in body and wings, of the house to which the 
heart had been pilgrimage, but 

" He's not the true king for a' that** 

It was not the house of Henry Clay. Of course 



WnO GOES THERE f 205 

the owner had the right to manage the estate as 
his judgment counselled ; yet 1 think he owed it to 
such a father to let that house stand while beam 
and rafter would bind. It might burn down, blow 
down, crush in or crumble out, — that would have 
been the same touch of time that effaces all thino-s ; 
but the nation did ask, did hope that the house 
whence Henry Clay had - so often departed on mis- 
sion of eloquent word and statesman act, would 
remain. The superb grounds of Ashland pro- 
vided many most eligible situations for new and 
luxurious dwellings. It would have been but kind 
to the friends of Mr. Clay to have given the old 
house to alternate storm and sunshine for the years, 
as they were on the silver-voiced old man. But 
the regrets were vain. The house of association 
was oif the land, and this elegant new one was in 
its place. 

Thanks to that man who invented the words 
real estate, the soil could not be taken away. In 
•all its matchless beauty of tree and lawn and field 
and glade and garden, Ashland existed, more 
lovely than our hope or thought of it had created, 
and just such a surrounding of the lovely as could 
instruct in its symbol .language the tongue of the 
orator. These were the earth- written memorlesf 
of Henry Clay. It was in this delightful scenery 
that his home-life had passed. This land was his 



206 WHO GOES THERE f 

home. It cannot be changed, and, once seen, is 
not to be forgotten. The residents of the house were 
absent, but the courtesy of the attendants permit- 
ted us to wander over the lawns and take closer 
look at the superb trees. As we were not invited 
to the garden by any proper authority, we did not 
bear aw^ay any floral souvenir, but we secured 
some of the grasses and some ash, out of which 
the cunning of the graver should fabricate some 
memorial of the day. In this soil I could see some 
reason for the ardent home-love which has so dis- 
tinguished the people of this State. 

A bright, manly little fellow rode up the lawn 
on his black pony. It needed but a glance at his 
face, and the resemblance w^as so apparent, so truth- 
ful, so much like Jiim^ that we at once exclaimed, 
" The Mill-Boy of the Slashes ! '-' The incident 
was delightful. It was looking back upon a page 
of closed time, with a truthfulness which we can- 
not forget. I have seldom seen such accuracy of 
resemblance as this grandson bore to his illustrious 
lineage. 

We found the space allotted by that resistless 
fate, the railway's time-table, too short, for Ash- 
land grew upon our liking. It had, in its natural 
features, all we could hav-e asked for it to furnish 
us in confirmation of the mind's picturing. A 
place it was to which a statesman might go to re- 



WHO GOES THERE f 207 

invigorate the mind chafed by the strife of the 
patriot in the struggle of that contest that ever 
will be between the noble-hearted and the untrue. 

We took from the gates of Ashland the keenest 
regret that the views of the country and of the 
proprietor of the estate cguld not have harmonized 
in the preservation of the house, but consoled to 
our very heart by the conviction that the fields 
and flowers and trees, he had loved so well, had 
perpetual home of beauty. 

And now, when the scale of just discrimination 
of his worth, just appreciation of his power, just 
estimate of his genius comes to that fair poise when 
history makes up the record, the shadows of cal- 
umny and opposition and wrong, that once were 
so dense around him, are breaking away. We 
must moderate our fear of present injustice by re- 
membering that truth is a distant magnet, but it is 
a sure one. It will draw to it the right and the 
honorable. Let every public man remember that, 
to his earthly career, something of the great rule 
of Christian conduct belongs. It is the far-oif end 
that makes the quiet of the present hour. It was 
the middle of the nineteenth century before Ma- 
caulay rose to enshrine in its truth the man and 
the results of the Revolution of 1688. 

The grandeur of Mr. Clay's public service some- 
body will yet be found truly to delineate ; and so, 



208 WHO GOES THERE f 

in writing of his home, we take up the old refrain, 
" Here's to you, Harry Clay !" 

There must have been something of the prophetic 
in Washington Irving's thought when he gave to 
his home, on the eastern shore of the Hudson, the 
appellation of Sunnyside; for, so far as we see, 
who only judge by the surface, it was a pleas- 
ant and a prosperous abiding-place ever ; and the 
judgment of the transient observer seems con- 
firmed by the record of his life, as his biographer 
has memorialized it. Yet he won it after years, 
many years of cares and of vicissitudes, and the 
Sunnyside of the river was that to which he, like 
almost all other men, attained only after crossing 
the agitated and troubled tide. 

I had some opportunities of personally observing 
him, and had the good sense to know that they 
were worthy of being improved, as far as good 
manners would permit. His early writings flowed 
into the genial, thoughtful, ideal life of literature 
which was forming under the influences of the 
Waverle^^ books, leading men to look at the old 
time through the exquisite veil which intellect was 
weaving over it. Mr. Irving took the dwellings 
of the past, and declining to people them, as did 
Mrs. Radcliffe, with spectres, who made the days 
hideous and the nights uncomfortable, and led the 
visitor only up dark staircases, through trap-doors, 



WBO GOES THERE? 209 

into dungeons ; and declining, also, to make the 
chief interest gather in some mailed knight who 
revelled and raided, he gave to the old manor- 
house the glad life of the true-hearted old gentle- 
man, the well-mannered lady, the sport and kind- 
nesses of old, not over-old, tradition. Perhaps he 
took up the thread which, in Sir Roger de Cov- 
erly, the essayist of the SpectqJ:or had commenced 
to weave. Whatever was the secret of his suc- 
cess, he was successful, and he deserved it. In his 
case, at least, the goddess Fortune of literature 
walked with unbandaged eyes and saw the right 
man and put him in the right place. 

In 1841, a map, that was really very curious, came 
into my possession. It delineated the old posses- 
sions of the New Netherlands. It had vague ideas, 
indeed, of lakes and districts ; and where now are 
the rich and prosperous lands of western New 
York, was on this a collection of hard, Indian des- 
ignations, and quaint pictures of the savages' 
camps and wigwams. But, in one respect, it was 
rich and replete with information, and that was 
in the department of the Hudson river, where all the 
demands of the historian seemed to he met, in the 
blending of the aboriginal and the colonists' names 
of shore and mountain and village. I sent to Mr. 
Irving a copy of this map, and called his attention 
to the fact that over all the country on the border 

14 



210 WHO GOES THERE? 

of tlie river opposite his home, there was the 
record of the ownersliip of the Heer Van Neder- 
horst. The name was new to me, as connected 
with manorial grant, but the map seemed to give 
him a domain so wide, that I considered It emi- 
nently worthy of research, to know who was this 
great "laird" of ten thousand Hudson riverside 
acres. 

His answer to my letter indicated that the gift 
of the map was to him a welcome one. He says : 
" I highly prize the historical document with which 
you have furnished me. When leisure presents, I 
will endeavor to study out this map with the lights 
afforded by old books and records, concerning the 
early history of the Hudson and its dependencies. 
My time and attention are, however, so much cut 
up and engrossed by a thousand domestic cares and 
concerns, that I seem daily to have less and less 
leisure and quietude for literary pursuits. I can 
only say, that the chords you have touched upon 
in your communications with me are such as are 
peculiarly in unison with my tastes and humors. 

" As to the Heer Nederhorst, I have an Idea 
that I have a memorandum concerning him among 
my papers, and that a Colonic or a Patroonship 
was granted to him on the west side of the river, 
on which he attempted to form a settlement, and 
to raise tobacco, but without success. I may be 



WHO GOES THERE f 211 

mistaken, but will look into the matter. I have 
been very desirous of ferreting out the original 
Indian names. Many of them are contained in 
the old title-deeds, and may be found in the clerk's 
offices of the various river counties. I have res- 
cued two or three localities in my own neighbor- 
hood from their vile, commonplace names, and 
restored to them their wild Indian names, which 
happened to be quite euphonious." 

Some years afterward, the Senate of the State 
of New York, on the motion of the Hon. George 
R. Babcock, of Buffalo, directed its clerk to pro- 
cure the " restoration " of an old portrait, de- 
clared to be of Columbus, which in a long, long 
time past, had been presented to the Senate by 
Maria Farmer, a descendant of Jacob Leisler. 
It seemed to the clerk, as he examined the history 
of the gift, that its descent from Leisler w^as a very 
curious and interesting feature. That unfortunate, 
but distinguished man had been the martyr to his 
adherence to the Revolution of 1688, — to his 
faith in the more liberal principles for which Wil- 
liam of Orange had come to the sovereignty of 
England. He had travelled in Europe, and it 
seemed most probable that he had brought this 
portrait home with him, as purporting to be of a 
name everywhere the property of America. The 
picture was admirably restored by Williams, Ste- 



212 WHO GOES THERE f 

vens, and Williams, and it is at this hour an orna- 
ment of the senate chamber. 

The clerk of the Senate wrote a report of his 
fulfilment of his duty, which, on the motion of the 
Hon. John A. Cross, of Brooklyn, was entered 
on the journals of the Senate, and a copy of this 
volume of the journals was directed to be sent to 
Mr. Irving, which was done, and this grateful 
acknowledgment made ; — 

" SuNNYSiDE, February 23, 1851. 

" Dear Sir, — I have the honor to acknowledge the re- 
ceipt of your letter "of the 27th January, accompanying 
copies of a resolution of the Senate, and of its Journal for 
the session of 1850. On referring to the appendix to that 
journal, I am made sensible of the signal compliment in- 
tended me by the Senate in directing the transmission of 
this document. 

" To be deemed by that honorable and enlightened body, 
worthy to have my name in any degree associated with that 
of the illustrious discoverer, whose achievements I have at- 
tempted to relate, is, indeed, a reward beyond the ordinary 
lot of authors. 

" I am unacquainted with the forms of the Senate, but I 
beg you will communicate in a suitable way to that honora- 
ble body, my deep and grateful sense of this very flattering 
mark of their consideration." 

I doubt if Mr. Irving ever realized thoroughly 
the full measure of popularity which he really pos- 
sessed with the people, making his name one of the 



IVRO GOES THERE? 213 

few in the value of which all men united, and of 
which the nation was earnestl}^ proud. 

In 1857, I visited him at Sunnyside, making a 
delightful preface to such a visit, by an hour at 
the house of his neighbor and intimate friend and 
kinsman, the Hon. M. H. Grinnell. In all re- 
spects, — in the society that accompanied me, — in 
the day, — in the preliminary ride through Wol- 
fert's Dell, with its beautiful landscape, such a pic- 
ture of beauty hanging over the Hudson, — in all 
these, it was a visit that was to me a memorable 
one. Sunnyside, as long as stone and lime shall 
bind together, will be attractive in association. It 
deserves attraction from its own tasteful and cosey 
Appointments, — being, in plan and form and in 
situation, much nearer the solid of an ideal, than 
it is often given to genius to achieve. 

Soon after we arrived at the house, Mr. Irving 
came in, and his way and manner impressed me as 
being very active and lively, not at all over-man- 
nered, but with a joyous friendliness, that was very 
agreeable to the visitor. His conversation was 
delightful, anecdotical, continuous, and full of 
enjoyment. He eulogized Moore and rejoiced in 
Scott, — especially exulting in the memory of the 
days he passed at Abbottsford, and his manner of 
uttering this was very impressive. " I said to 
myself," said he, '* in the evening of each of those 



214 WHO GOES THERE? 

days, this lias been a perfectly happy day. Now 
mind — I said it then — I do not say it now." I 
understood this to mean that he conveyed to me 
his conviction that it was not through the pleasant 
maze of colored memories that he expressed his 
enjoyment, but that he had said this eulogy of the 
days, while they were witli him, and while all de- 
tail, all incident, was vivid in his recollection. 

An allusion was made to the delight with which 
a young lady who was with me had read his Tales 
of Alhambra. Instantly he started up with great 
animation, and walking rapidly across the room, 
said, " Oh, I can show her a portion of the 
frieze of one of its walls," — which he did. I 
remember his defending Moore against the charg^, 
which his autobiographical diary would seem to 
prove, that he isolated himself in his social pleas- 
ures, without his wife's participation, even when 
they were the gayeties of the neighborhood, — as in 
the instance of his many delightful visits to Lord 
Lansdowne's mansion, Bowood, — Mr. Irving said 
that Mrs. Moore declined to accompany him. She 
saw or believed she saw that there was a distinc- 
tion in the welcome to, or in the position of, the 
great author and his wife, and hence, in what we 
should call " standing on her dignity," she re- 
mained at home. In a letter subsequent to that 



WHO GOES THERE? 215 

visit, Mr. Irving alluded to Moore's writing con- 
cerning this country : — 

" Moore was a very young man -when lie visited this conn- 
try, and lived to regret the wrong impressions he received 
and published concerning its inhabitants. I wonder Lord 
John Russell, who was his litei-ary executor, did not omit 
some insulting passages contained in those early letters, 
which I am convinced, Moore himself would have oblit- 
erated, had he revised them for the press." 

These hours at Sunnyslde, — seeing Mr. Irving 
surrounded by the kindred to whose happiness his 
life seemed one constant devotion — with the audit 
of his 2;enlal talk — himself in full life and good 
spirits — his themes the great minds with whom he 
had held more intimate association than had any 
other man in America, — these were hours that it 
would be treason to one's own highest enjoyment 
to forget. As we left, he accompanied us to the 
outer door, and passing a little room, said In his 
terse, emphasized way : " There — there is the 
place where I am busy at my work (the Life of 
Washington) — busy at it — putting the dead 
coloring; on." 

It was the " dead colorIn2 " in the Drogress of 



& 



pr( 



the intellectual picture then, but history has framed 
it in her gallery of portraits ; that will abide the 
look of the ages. 



216 PfEO GOES THERE? 

I saw him afterward at church, at Tarrytown, 
and of all persons I think he was the most attentive. 
It must have been in him the high good manners 
of principle, for I do recollect that the sermon was 
especially cold and uninteresting. He seemed to 
me different from his portraits, — so much so, that 
when he entered the. room at Sunnyside, it was a 
surprise to me. I have since stood by Palmer's 
side, as he, from photograph and sketch, was 
moulding the bust which is such a triumph of his 
art, and I thouo;ht in that I could see Mr. Irving 
as he looked in life. There was a turn of his 
features toward the utterance of, or relish for, a 
pleasantry, a quick discernment of the ludicrous, 
and in his face the expression of a man with a 
solidity of comfort about him. Eliot, the great 
portrait painter, told me that when he (Mr. Eliot) 
went up to Sunnyside specially to make semblance 
of him, Mr. Irving laughingly declined. " No," 
said he, '' I shall not perpetuate such a libel on 
myself as to have a picture of an old man made, 
and then to hear it said, ' Is this the old fellow who 
has written all those tender love stories ? ' Oh, 
\io, that wont do ! " 



CHAPTER VI. 



.^ 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



rusal 



ONFINED, almost without exception, as 
these records are, to the memories of those 
who have left the land of the livino;, and 
fully defined history and character, I hoped 
not to have included the name of Edward 
Everett. I even thought that, perhaps, he 
might give this book the honor of a pe- 
for he had so kindly noticed, in a specific 
chapter of his Mount Vernon papers, a former 
work, the Life of Daniel Boone, written by me. 

But the inexorable fate of all overtook him, and 
he died in the strength of his fame, without twi- 
light to his long day of service to mankind and of 
honor to himself. No apologies for decadence 
dimmed that fame. He died while a nation was 
gazing at him, and the universal grief of the 
nation was the wail at his >rave. He had been 
the utterer of the oracles of holy writ, and the tra- 
ditions of that time were a precious memory^ a leg- 
end of gold and frankincense and myrrh, brouglit to 

(217) 



218 WBO GOES THERE 1 

the holy treasury ; he had taken the uppermost place 
among American scholars, and gave to that name 
a solid and a sure worth, which made it recognized 
in the old world of intense student and tested 
learning; he had, in his department of oratory, 
risen where he was not even rivalled ; of states- 
manship, of diplomacy, he had had and held the 
best and worthiest ; he was illustrious to his very 
townsmen ; and thus he died in his seat on the dais 
of his race, and the head of the nation led the nation 
to mourn over him. His ambition could have com- 
passed in its imaginings no worthier name or fame. 

He had seen all the wisest and the worthiest. 
The welcomed guest of Scott, acquaintance of 
Byron, and these typing all the long list of excel- 
lences and dignities, — having seen all these closely 
and intimately, knowing the best of the past and 
great in the present, what was there more that was 
" of the earth, earthy " for his illustration or ex- 
perience ? 

I first saw Edward Everett, if I may say I saw 
him, in the twilight, and its shades deeper than its 
light, of a September evening, on the Common, at 
Boston, in 1851, beneath a great tent, or pavilion, 
which had been spread over a large space there, in 
which to give a banquet to the guests at Boston's 
most hospitable Railway Jubilee. That city be- 
lieved itself bound to the Canadas, and indeed to 



WHO GOES THERE 1 219 

«ill mankind, by the chain of iron it had forged by 
/ts enterprise ; and this was the coming together 
of the wisest and the worthiest to fehcitate state 
and nation, and especially each other, that so 
much was well and worthily done. Mr. Everett 
was about fifty-six years of age, certainly in his 
prime, although his whole life was in great degree 
worthy of being styled thus. It had been a day 
of great festivity. The pageant had almost ex- 
hausted Boston's decorative skill. The procession 
had innumerable devices, and very curious and 
very beautiful they were. The schools were there, 
and there was the charm. There were artificers 
in all the precious stones in the display, but there 
were the workers in mind, " more precious than 
rubies." The true treasures of the city were 
there, and they told where its strength lay ; and if 
Canadians conned that lesson well, their visit had 
something better than the memories of a gala day. 
The boys were orderly, — that was eulogy enough. 
In the thronging crowd, room was made for the 
girls to walk through safely. Men unused to par- 
lor life did this kindly ; and this true chivalry, 
exercised toward the gentle and defenceless, won 
my admiration more than would a myriad of the 
studied and often interested courtesies of men 
toward each other, — the practising with a masque, 
as so much of it is. There was a miniature JEtna 



220 WHO GOES THERE 1 

in the line ; it smoked sneezingly. I doubt if the 
mountain is as odoriferous. There was a fire- 
worker, who had a wizard before, and a great vam- 
pyre bat in the rear of his vehicle, puzzling every- 
body, and acting with a dramatic excellence that 
would have won a smile from Garrick. 

I remember with what genms for contrast the 
pianoforte-makers made their display. An old box 
of 1793, looking up from its cracked jingle to a 
gorgeous grand, all-radiant, in rosewood, and with 
a tone that would touch the music nerve even of 
that musicless man that Shakspeare anathematizes. 

Through all this labyrinth of dainty and rare 
devices, the three thousand guests of Boston 
wended their way to the pavilion ; and although 
the vast army of spectators were subjected to the 
most severe ordeal of submission that can occur to 
man, — seeing others going to dinner when they 
are not, — yet there was the grandeur of a quiet 
adherence to all the arrangements of the day. It 
was a jproud day for the good order of Boston. 
Generally, the people that go to these great public 
feasts, like those who are found at the elegant sup- 
pers of fashion, are of a class of people who live at 
home very well, certainly with quite enough and in 
abundance of the aliment of life. Why is it, then, 
that such people generally eat with such vigor and 
with such persevering relish ? Evidently the 



WHO GOES THERE? 221 

causes lie deep within. We drank the coffee, and 
Jid not murmur for cliampagi^e ; and in the aroma 
of the Arabian berry there was abundant merri- 
ment. 

The President of the United States (Mr. Fill- 
more) was a guest, and at his side was the Gov- 
ernor of the Canadas (Elgin and Kincardine) ; 
and when, in the opening speech, these representa- 
tive men grasped each other's hands, it was dra- 
matic. We all felt the beauty of the incident, and 
the great crowd in the pavilion was stirred with 
feeling, as witnessing something more than a per- 
sonal courtesy. Lord Elgin made a very good 
speech, — effective, bright, right on, with Ameri- 
can facility of utterance. I had seen him before, 
acting as the representative of the Crown, in the 
Parliament, at Toronto, upon the Council throne, 
the Council before him, the Commons at the bar; 
Lord Frederick Bruce, since prominent in China, 
at his side, and himself buttoned cruelly close in 
blue and silver. We all thought him a man of 
eloquent expression, educated language, and clear 
good sense ; and when Victoria's health was given, 
the pavilion thousands sent forth a cheer that 
calmed the old echoes that might have haunted 
these revolutionary streets. Then might a smile 
have come to the lip of the dead of the Old Prov- 
ince House. It was one of the hours of that 



222 WHO GOES THERE f 

which Mr. Monroe called, " the era of good feel- 
ing." 

Long before the audience wanted to leave, the 
darkness of the evening closed around us, and the 
eloquent voices came to us out of the obscure ; and 
strange and quaint it was to catch the different 
lights and sliadows of this great crowd, all listen- 
ing in attention, while but few could with any dis- 
tinctness see the speakers. 

I there first heard the voice of Edward Everett, 
and the chord of the master-hand was revealed. 
That sweet and strong enunciation, those sculp- 
tured sentences, that wealth of imagery, the 
pleasant and fitting illustrations, — all these went 
to the heart of the audience and made his address 
the favorite of the occasion. 

This magnificent banquet — so in its intellec- 
tual food, though simple in that which ministered 
to the mortal part — closed. All that remained 
for the jubilee was to light up park and hall and 
mansion, with brilliant illumination, and this was 
charmingly done. I stood by the crescent sheet 
that the Cochituate spreads on the common. In 
the beautiful light of the day, the fountain, spring- 
ing from its long journey of aqueduct and tube, 
seemed glistening in joy at its release. It formed 
its arch of crystal, breaking, dissolving, — now 
a silver sheet and now a feathery plume. This 



WEO GOES THERE f 223 

night, the rocket and the Bengola light flung their 
vivid green and red and white brilhancj toward 
the sky, and this pure spring-water formed a mir- 
ror for all the beauty of the gay fires above, and 
the ripples turned to emerald or azure or crimson 
as each arched over it. Except as these bars of 
light existed for the moment, the Common was 
densely dark and gloomy in its foliage. From the 
ancient cemetery of Copp's Jlill, from all the 
avenues, the fires went up, and giant torches 
seemed quivering over Boston. 

I remember that old John Hancock's house, from 
the ancient attic to the parlors, — not less curious 
and old-fashioned, — was in full illumination. 
Amidst this labyrinth of light and shadow this 
jubilee ended ; and it was a pleasant thought to 
associate one's first knowledge of such a name as 
that of Everett with so much of beauty. 

In 1853, the people of Plymouth called to that 
ancient town — that town so buried up under a 
cairn of eulogies, of odes, of speeches, of all 
that something of history and much of imagination 
can effect, — all who desired to breathe the air 
of the ocean in the fervid month of August ; all 
who desired to know the capabilities of Plymouth 
for a gala day ; and all who wished to hear Edward 
Everett utter his noble words of philosophical 
beauty in and around the Rock. Of the 22d of 



224 WHO GOES THERE? 

Decembe.", as memorialized at this town, we had 
often heard ; but the wild coast winds and driving 
snows were no incentive to hospitality, and so 
our ingenious friends contrived this celebration of 
the Embarkation of the Pilgrims, or, as one of. the 
legends in the street, wittily called it — Forefather's 
©ay thawed out. Of course, thither we moved, 
having Mrs. Hemans' stanzas as our text of 
thought, and looking closely out for that " stern 
and rock-bound shore." I recollect that being 
compelled, by some miscalculation of railway hour, 
to take the long drive from Centre Abington, we 
doubted in the midnight if there was such place 
as Plymouth, — whether it was not all a myth, and 
Elder Brewster and the Rock and the Mayflower 
were not shadowy as Homers heroes and battle- 
fields. But the horses were good and the driver was 
sober. We read guide-boards by cigar-light, and the 
Samoset at last by its watch said to us, Welcome, 
Englishmen ; or, if not thus literally following the 
Indian's unexpected voice, gave us that which 
Shenstone declares a real pleasure — the welcome 
of an inn. It puzzled us how the wearied May- 
flower found its way 1>liither. The town was in 
situation and circumstance ver} different from the 
thought yestsrday cherished in respect to it. The 
current idea of it is of a small and very old settle- 
ment, with a bold, bluff point projecting out into 



WHO GOES THEME f 225 

the sea ; and the Rock, the most auspicious feat- 
ure of the scene. Such is the Plymouth of the 
mind ; but the reahtj is different. Behind two or 
three enfoldings of cape and beach and sea-wall, it 
is about the last place into which a vessel would be 
sure to come as a matter of course. It must have 
perplexed the solemn sailors to have found their 
way inward. It is a shelter from the sea. One 
hears the moaning of the ocean, but it is heard as 
we hear the rain on the roof. 

But where is the Rock ? Right out in the open 
sea, we thought, — its bold, age-worn surface swept 
by every storm. So we rushed to find it, — if, in- 
deed, we were not rather disappointed that it was 
not seen far above all edifices, the great landmark 
of the coast. Not first to have gone to it, would 
have been to neglect St. Peter's on a visit to Rome. 
We found Mrs. Hemans and the romance of his- 
tory poor guides ; so threading our way through 
narrow streets, with " ancient and fish-like " pecu- 
liarities, with stores bearing the old sign of West 
India goods, around corners and through lanes, 
we traced it out at last, — some benevolent indi- 
vidual having written its locality, for the use and 
behoof of strangers, not in letters of granite or 
iron, but in a chalk formation ; and at last we stood 
upon the Rock, — that is, on so much of it as the 
debris and neglect and shocking bad taste and 



226 WHO GOES THERE f 

historical neglect of this people had left above- 
ground. Was this our Mecca ? I could absolve 
myself and reflect that westward lineage of my own 
had smoked peaceable pipes on Castle Island many 
years before this world-moving expedition reached 
Plymouth. We returned to the Samoset, wiser 
and sadder. We afterward found high and dry 
in the main street, encompassed with a railing, a 
great piece of the Rock, reft from its historical 
place ; and we recollected that a fragment of it 
does duty as a curiosity in a Brooklyn steeple. 
But we sorrowed in all good earnest over the 
fatality that seems to attach in our country to all 
historical monuments. 

Pleasanter associations soon effaced this. Old 
Plymouth seemed set in a crown of flowers, and 
wherever we looked some of those fair girls, — who 
keep up the lineage of handsome Penelope Pel- 
ham, whose portrait, in Pilgrim Hall, fascinated 
us, — everywhere these had adorned arch and 
roof and corridor and balcony with floral loveli- 
ness, and we were at once fascinated followers in 
the train of the daughters of the May and August 
flower. 

The morning brought with it a fog, the after- 
noon a sweet sunshine, and thus the Pilgrim's 
experiences were symboled. The heavens often 
write such lessons in their shining and their 



i 



WHO GOES THERE? 227 

shadows. I saw in the gathering to the Tent, a 
procession of ladies, and they moved on in a most 
orderly way, perhaps because of the grand review 
of look and observation which was before them. 
The scene in the Pavilion w^as a beautiful one ; for 
it v^as a gathering of such order, such respecta- 
bility, and ii;i that crowd of fair women, so much 
of beauty ; and it is pleasant to chronicle, that was 
the day when the fashion of the bonnet was of 
the very prettiest. Up on the dais came Gov. 
Clitford, and the elder Quincy, and Hale, Sum- 
ner, and, as the master mind of all — Everett. It 
was a circle of ihustrious names, and they had 
before them an appreciative audience. 

At that time, one of the leading themes that 
v^^as woven into all public address and private con- 
versation, was the subject of the extension of our 
territorial area, — a little restlessness toward Cuba 
and Central America. The tiger had tasted Texas. 
It was also a day when the absurdity of the spir- 
itual rappings was in its height or its depth. Mr. 
Everett was superb. His audience hushed at the 
sound of his mamiificent sentences. 

Has Plymouth ever really raised the monument, 
of which this was to be the hour of origin ? If it has 
not, then is there a great duty left undone, and we 
shall be free to believe her ardent sons rather insin- 
cere in their adulation. A few old houses to come 



228 WHO GOES THERE? 

down, an area of old wharf to be demolished, and 
it seemed as if the Rock micrht ao;ain be bound to 
the sea, — fit base for some lofty pile of commemo- 
ration. I think if New York could identify the 
exact spot where Hendrick Hudson first landed on 
the Island of Manhattan, our Historical Society 
would never rest till granite made its memory per- 
manent. 

I remember that there was a model there of the 
Mayflower, — a tall, high-decked, clumsy affair. 
It is not wonderful that the dear old ship made a 
four months' voyage. Scant form of the clipper 
is there about her, and in a race to California, the 
Flying Cloud could give her start as far as Cape 
Horn, and then reach the Golden Gate and begin 
to discharge cargo before she arrived. Scott, in 
his Peveril of the Peak, savs that England cast 
forth the Pilgrims as a drunkard loses from his lap 
precious jewels. 

It was a day of good memories. I would have 
thought it a little more in the gratitude of true 
history, had I seen, amidst the profusion of bunt- 
ing that floated everywhere, the flag of Holland, 
which had for so many months sheltered the Pil- 
grims, and whose large and lofty hospitality made 
that land of the sea the refuge for the free thought 
of all countries. 

At night, Plymouth was bright with festal fires, 



WHO GOES THERE? 229 

and glad in the harmonies of skilled music. Rock- 
ets, bursting into stars of polychrome, made radiant 
messengers so far in the upper air, that it may be 
distant vessels, on their ocean way, made note in 
their nautical record of strange meteors playing in 
the heavens in the latitude of the Rock, and weird 
leo;ends micrlit have been thus woven of celestial 
colors, makincT memorial of the Pilo;rims' varied 
fortunes. 

At a very agreeable '' reception," given in the 
evening of that memorable day, I think at the 
house of Mr. Warren, in the course of the conver- 
sation, I mentioned to Mr. Everett, that when a 
student in the law-office of the distinguished Har- 
manus Bleecker, of Albany, whom I knew to be a 
great favorite with the Boston people, with Mr. 
Appleton and the Quincys, and with Mr. Everett 
himself, Mr. Bleecker, as a choice morsel amidst 
the dry hard tack of the law, had allowed me to 
read, in manuscript, a sermon of Mr. Everett's 
delivery, when clergyman of a church in Boston; 
and that I could well recollect my delight in it. 
It was upon the text, '' Who will shoAV us any 
good?" 

In the description of this festival, reference 
was made to sentences in his address which 
seemed to me to take a surprisingly mild view 
of the then advancing idea of the filibuster, 



^Sa WHO GOES THERE 1 

as the disturbers of the peace of nations were 
called. — Under date of August 12, 1853, he 
very kindly alludes to this narrative of the Plym- 
outh celebration, and says: "I think if you will 
carefully read my remarks, you will not find them 
open to the exception intimated by yourself. I 
spoke only of the transfer of the culture of the Old 
World (with the requisite improvements) to the 
New. To meet exceptions which had been taken, 
in several cases invidiously, to the same sentiment 
expressed by me on former occasions, I took care, 
by three or four qualifying clauses, to exclude the 
inference that this was necessarily to be done under 
any one political organization. You will ask, 
perhaps, why use at all a language so likely to 
be misunderstood and confounded with the doc- 
trine of the filibusters ? To this question there 
are two answers. First, it is impossible to say 
anything warmly and earnestly which will not be 
both misapprehended and misrepresented. Sec- 
ond, I use such language for much the same 
reason that led Wesley to set his hymns to good 
music. I wish to show the country that a sound 
and true conservatism does not require one to be 
eternally croaking, and is not insensible to the 
hopes and glories of that future to which the anal- 
ogy of the past authorizes us to look forward." 
He then requests me to aid him in procuring for 



WHO GOES THERE? 231 



liim the sermon to which I have alluded. " I have 
been for years endeavoring to obtain the return of 
my manuscripts of every kind, that I may, while I 
live, make such selection and disposition of them 
as may save trouble to those who come after me." 

It was my great good fortune to be present at 
the festival of the United States Scientific Associa- 
tion, held at Albany, in August, 1856. I doubt 
whether any fete more successful was ever known 
in our country, in the character of those who 
gathered and in the high tone of talent which dis- 
tinojuished all that was said or done, and of all 
which the address, on the uses of Astronomy, by 
Mr. Everett, was far away the master-piece, the 
intellectual crown. 

I remember that Albany was a very busy place 
at that time ; for besides the convention of savans, 
there was a gathering of those who studied in 
political convention the laws of power. There 
was a welcome given to the savans at the capitol. 
The great rooms of that edifice were appropriate, 
in their diversity and magnitude, for all the pur- 
poses of hospitality. The Assembly and Senate 
halls received learned gentlemen and lovely ladies ; 
and those who had seen the capitol in so many 
other uses, confessed its rare fitness to enable us to 
realize what must be the capacities of the castle 
structures of Europe to the services of opulent en- 



232 WHO GOES THBREf 

tertainment. The fullest flounce of fashion had 
room and verge enough. Once before that capi- 
tol opened its doors to festive uses. It was when 
Lafayette, as the Guest of the Nation, was received 
there, and when a ballroom was found — a superb 
one indeed — in the Assembly chamber. 

The successive sessions, during the week, of the 
different sections of the meetino; left the visitor in 
embarrassment, in the copious treasure of mental 
power everywhere offered to him. It was the 
American scholar urged to indicate his best by the 
presence of his peers, and there were offerings on 
the altar of science where abiding good might 
safely be predicted. It was the evidence of the 
great advance of our people out of the struggling 
life of frontier pioneer poverty to the riches of in- 
tellectual excellence ; and as if to bind all this to 
the past, I saw there one who stood by the side 
of Governor Clinton as the first earth was moved 
for the construction of the canal, — one who was 
fellow-passenger with Robert Fulton in the first 
voyage by steam. 

It was very interesting to observe the scholars 
of America, — the scholars in science, — for our pos- 
session of a great array of such is often doubted and 
probably wisely doubted, by ourselves. We do not 
do for mental treasure what we do for the oil, — dig 
long and deep and unceasingly, through all obsta- 



WHO GOES THERE? 233 

cle, over all difficulty. In no country, as much 
as in ours, does patience not perform its entire- 
work. We crowd life with the desperate etTort to 
know something of all things. Perhaps this is 
wise, the greatest wisdom. It is a question not 
settled yet. Some of these savans were thor- 
ough, and had their one department of science : 
thus, Henry R. Schoolcraft was patient in his in- 
vestigation into the ethnology of the Indian. Per- 
haps I was impressed with the seeming glamour of 
his ideas about their lano;uaa;e, their words those 
of necessity. They lived an existence of alarm 
amidst the gloom of the wood, and did not disturb 
the Faun and Satyr by over-much intrusion of 
sound into the forest shadow. Not till civilization 
came did they make record of their tongue. The 
language of labor was English ; the language of 
their diplomacy, their inter-governmental commu- 
nication as of themselves, the Algonquin. 

An intelligent captain of a merchant vessel gave 
graphic illustration of the benefit he had derived 
from his belief in Mr. Hedfield's law of storms. 
The circle is the path of the storm ; and the rules 
of the savan enabled the sailor to exercise a watch- 
fulness which seemed like reading the future. 
This captain's vessel was proceeding from Valpa- 
raiso to New York, and he and all his crew desired 
to make it, if possible, of all voyages, the speediest ; 



234 WHO GOES THERE f 

and thus pressed on by the full-aired canvas, the 
ship went at a rate of progress that promised a 
speedy look at the lights of home. The captain 
observed facts which he believed were exponents, 
according to Mr. Redfield, of proximate danger. 
His authority was supreme ; but when he gave the 
order to shorten sail and delay, all qn board 
thought it a foolish sacrifice to the illusion of a 
theory. But his was a ship where obedience fol- 
lowed command, and the ship paused, paused as it 
eventuated on the edge of the circle of destruc- 
tion ; for, when he resumed his course, and at last 
reached Sandy Hook, the pilots had but one color 
of tidings to communicate, and that was of the 
darkest, for a more wild and fearful storm had 
scarcely ever poured out its might ; and but for 
that delay, influenced by that theory, the ship 
would have met that storm in all its power. 

I heard much of geological discussion. It was 
the very place to hear it in its best array of in- 
genious theory and puzzling fact. ' An eminent 
geologist (Mr. James Hall) presided over the great 
assemblage of savans. These wise men wandered 
into regions of fore-time. They traced out, in the 
strata, the slowly accumulating developments of 
life; they bewildered us by their profound and 
elaborate doctrines ; and we who could* not contro- 
vert, and were too polite to contradict, heard, and 



WHO GOES THERE? 235 

were as amazed as tliey could have desired. But, 
at this comfortable distance, I must say, even if 
the saying depresses my volume, that it seems to 
me that there is not a geological appearance, or a 
zoological indication, however buried up or con- 
cealed or blended with rock, or immersed in drift, 
on hill-top or under ocean bed, but that every dif- 
ficulty fades before the great explanation of the 
Deluo;e. An earth created with all the unities of 
formation, has poured upon it the terrific forces of 
an all-pervading overflow. The fountains of the 
great deep break up. Over all the terrific ocean 
rises with a dread so awful, tliat only then in the 
history of Time is such power permitted. The 
promise is painted in the heavens that never again 
shall such be. Then the Earth rises from its en- 
counter with such forces a different structure ; 
torn, crushed, displaced, there is everywhere 
change, modification, transformation. While the 
summit of Ararat was under the wave, the work 
of ages was accomplished. 

The section appropriated to the Astronomers 
was very abstruse, but the ladies were special visit- 
ants to the star-gazers. It was a contemptible 
servility ; but it was a curious word used by the 
old poet Rogers, uttered to one of our own citizens, 
when talking with him about death, — " I want to 

go, Mr. ," said he, " when I die, from star 

to star, to see in which of them woman is foumd." 



236 ^VJIO GOES THERE? 

These men of the ethereal study uttered learn- 
ing at wliich the common mind quails. I was 
drowned in the depths of the discourse upon the 
tidal currents of Saturn's Rlno;. The address was 
doubtless worthy, for it received the high honor of 
Joseph Henry's attention. If but th§ man who 
was in Albany one hundred and two years before 
this date (Frankhn), could have been at this gath- 
ering, he would have seen the development of the 
road to which his sparkling kite-string led. The 
enlightenment given by one savan, of the nebular 
hypothesis, was beyond ordinary comment. When 
Science undertakes to dance redowas and schot- 
tisches and mazourkas, those of us who, in ordi- 
nary affairs, miglit take partners, are content to be 
amazed. 

Charles Lamb wrote upon a leaf of his book of 
calculation, whicli lay on his desk at the India 
House, " This increases m interest as youjyrogressy 
It was so of the days of this Scientific Congress, 
and its narrative has detained me from the special 
theme of this chapter — Mr. Everett. I saw him 
presented to the body, whose institution of the 
Observatory had called the Congress of Savans 
together, and he next appeared on the stage at the 
closing day of the Association, the day just pre- 
vious to the Inauguration of the Dudley Observa- 
tory. This closing day was brilliant with Agassiz 



WEO GOES THERE f 237 

and Bache and Sir William Logan and Joseph 
Henry and President Anderson, all of whom, as I 
write, are living, and fulfilling the high promise of 
their talent. I like to watch a crowd while a man 
of intellect utters forth the strength of his thouo-ht. 
The ladies listen with such unfeigned attention, 
trusting and believing, and the men half suspect- 
ing, half yielding to the fascination. 

The venerable and very bright Dr. Samuel H. 
Cox amused us all by a clever episode. He said 
he had been talking, when in Europe, with a dis- 
tinguished titular personage, who said the United 
States were but the selvage of society. " No 
wonder," said the Doctor to him, " that you forget 
us, — we often forget you ; we are a continent, — 
you are but an island. If you will come over to 
us in the form of an island, we will find you a lake 
big enough to swim in!''' 

This Congress was a very popular one. The 
community have a mysterious respect for men who 
know so much. It is an enlarged and enlightened 
descent from the feeling of the darker ages, when 
the learned clerks moved gloomily from shrine to 
shrine. 

The Inauguration Day had its clouds, and one 
savan who had promulgated his theory of storms, 
was assailed by questioning as to what was indi- 
cated by them ; and he answered us with a .degree 



238 WHO GOES THERE? 

of confidence which reminded me of the weather 
predictions of Noma of the Fitful Head. 

In the front of the dais sat Everett, Agassiz, 
Silhman, and none would dispute their right to be 
in that roll of honor. After delays and interlocu- 
tory proceedings, all clever in their own way and 
time, but painfully protracting the coming of the 
event for w^hich that crowd had gathered, — the 
discourse of Edward Everett, -r- he rose. I knew 
his address was all thoroughly prepared. Indeed, 
it was already in type. I had it in my possession 
already ; he had given it to me on the previous 
evening, at the hospitable reception at the Manor 
House. He knew that I would not betray him by 
premature publication. I have since known that he 
passed several hours of the day on which he pro- 
nounced the discourse in intense study, so intense 
that it left its severe impress on his physical condi- 
tion. 

Of the grandeur of that discourse this testimony 
need not be given. It to-day is read by all men who 
seek the beauty of their own language. Without 
looking at note or brief, his gigantic memory un- 
rolled his long address, — not a word misplaced, 
without confusion or entanglement or error. I 
was perpetually interrupted in my interest at its 
glowing charm of expression, its most felicitous 
figure, so thoroughly sustained to the absorbing 



WHO GOES THERE f 239 

climax, by my amazement at his memory. It was 
precise. In describing the bridges over the Arno, 
in his picture of Florence, he intended to say that 
they hovered over, rather than spanned, the river, 
and he half used the word span first, and before 
the word was all pronounced, recovered himself; 
so intensely true was his memory to him. He 
moved in a constant but gentle walk over a space 
of ten feet ; his gestures natural, unless the tremor 
of his hand was an art ; his utterance very distinct, 
but his voice that day not doing justice to its sweet- 
ness, being veiled in the difficulties of a sad cold. 

Over and again this Astronomical Discourse 
may be read. I bear record that it was heard with 
intense interest, and to all that vast audience this 
was a grandeur of oratory. When it closed, I left 
the ground with a gentleman not at all favorably 
disposed toward Mr. Everett. Keen, cold, acute 
in his criticism, a very able and a very prominent 
man, master of his own thought, and controlling 
the public mind in great degree. " He has con- 
quered we," said he to me. I knew how much 
was meant by this testimony. I recollect Mr. Wil- 
liam Logan, the eminent geologist of the Canadas, 
said, " I did not think the English language capa- 
ble of this." The long and fully kept up passage 
in which he described the successive glories of the 
starry night's pathway to the sunrise, thrilled that 



240 WHO GOES THERE ^ 

crowd. I know that this. was the emotion of that 
hour, and it seems to me weh to chronicle thus 
what were the exact lineaments of a time so mem- 
orable as that of the delivery of one of the great 
addresses of the age, by the orator who, in his 
department, was unrivalled. 

There were many clergymen, and distinguished 
ones, in attendance. I would like to have gath- 
ered there all the synods, conventions, assemblies, 
conferences, convocations, and consociations, and 
for this one purpose, that they might have seen 
and heard how much men gain in their addresses 
to the human heart by speaking them, not read- 
ing, — by the utterance of voice, sustained by 
manner and gesture and eye. 

When Mr. Everett commenced — suffering as 
he did from a cold — I feared for his success. I 
had heard him in the strength of health and fairest 
tone of voice ; but I bear his fame witness, he was 
all himself. He spoke with such beauty, that I 
hesitate now to say whether I ever admired * his 
witchery of speech more than on this occasion. Such 
sentences, so much of elaborate preparation, and yet 
carried from memory into voice so successfully ! 

I watched this cold man — for so many called 
him — to see if emotion was kindled in him of his 
cwn thought. I saw his cheek flush and his eyo 
kmdle, and found no chill of the wheel of hfe there. 



WEO GOES THERE f 241 

The darkness of the evening shadowed the tent 
before this memorable Festival of Eloquence was 
over. It was a proud historic day for Albany, and 
some monumental record of that gathering should 
be placed where it was held. 

There is, in the series of Mr. Everett's Mount 
Vernon papers, a chapter in which he alludes to 
his experiences of the sleeping-car, then just intro- 
duced, and one of the great onward movements 
toward comfort in travelling. When Youno; ut- 
tered that famous expression, ''We take no note 
of time save by its loss," he did not know the gen- 
tlemen of the railway. The conductor keeps his 
finger on the pulse of the old graybeard, and 
values every throb. I have often thought that no 
cause in our American experience has done so 
much to teach Americans the value of every min- 
ute of time, as has the railway system. 6.17 
means something very practical when one arrives 
at a station at 6.20, and finds in these fractions, 
hitherto disregarded, the labor of his morning lost. 
Whoever has, for his sins, been compelled to travel 
at night before the sleeping-car was prepared, 
knows that the time is occupied in varying one's 
position so as to arrive at the exact weight of the 
head, and what degree of the tortuous and the 
twisted the vertebr8e of the neck will bear. Con- 
trast this with the luxury of an outstretched limb, 

IG 



242 WHO GOES THERE f 

a Space and circumstance of rest if not of sleep, — 
something of quiet ; the roar of the wheel beneath 
at last blenclino; into a dream, — a thouo-ht confusino- 
itself into the sweet chaos of welcome sleep. Not 
possessing a talent for sleep, I have often heard the 
wheel till my ear seemed at the engine's heart, lis- 
tening to its pulsation. The locomotive carries us 
on its giant arms, and the eye that closes in the 
shadowy pictures of the Mohawk, awakes amidst 
the life of Rochester. Mr. Everett complained of 
being interrupted in his sleep by conversation be- 
tween two railway officials. It is seldom that 

" The censer of censure is swung, 
And returns with the' incense of praise." 

I assured him that there was not an officer of the 
road, from president to brakesman, who would not 
wilhngly sit up all night, even after a day of labor, 
to listen to his utterances of words in beauty. 
Indeed, the best compliment, because fresh and 
original, of all I ever heard given to Mr. Everett, 
was by a railway man. We were all at Bing- 
hampton, listening to Mr. Everett's glorious dis- 
course on Washington. The admission fee was 
fifty cents. When the address finished, this man 
turned from his wrapt attention to his friend who 
sat next him, and says he, '' 77iis ought to Jiave 
been a dollar ! " 

This oration impressed me not only as a great 



WHO GOES THERE f 243 

tribute to the labors of the Scientific Association, 
but more than that, as a mastery. Our minds all 
the week had been at the feet of the philosophy, 
which, great as it is, is but the discovery of the 
greater or the better in the things that are seen. 
Here rose this man, in melody of voice and glory 
of thought, above all the theories of strata and 
classification, which were yesterday unknown, to- 
day are doubted, and to-morrow will be overthrown. 
How swept his voice over the chords of the human 
heart ! We live but in the Present, and the great 
Orator is master of the Present. To him Science 
is not the messenger ; it does but bring the marble 
out of which he carves the glorious statue. 

It ivas something to be a witness of the scenes 
of that day when Boston, by an address from 
Edward Everett, inaugurated the bronze statue of 
Daniel Webster ; for how could more suitable ora- 
tor find more felicitous theme ? A civilized human 
race seeks to perpetuate the remembrance of the 
men who have risen, by good or great deed, above 
their fellow-beings. It is the symbolizing of 
Memory, and by the consent of the ages, the 
statue is most appropriate. It has the material 
over which the fingers of the years pass softly. 
Europe has its halls and galleries and arches 
crowded with such forms of resemblance. All 
that the heart could desire in the beauty and truth 



244 WHO GOES THERE? 

of resembla.nce of tliose that the heart holds dear- 
est, the sculptor makes in perpetual form. Old 
Rome did not forget to teach the earth this lesson, 
in company with those by which the dead Lion 
yet governs the mind of mankind. 

These graven memorials Boston is accumulating, 
and the treasure cannot be too great. Washing- 
ton, Franklin, Warren, Bowditch, Story, in marble 
and in bronze, are there. Even the sweet stranger, 
Beethoven, is there, and the group would haVe 
been incomj^lete without the statue of Webster ! 

When I eulogize statuary as the most fitting 
memorial of men, I must, in my sense of truth, 
say, that the bronze statue is, of all others, least 
agreeable. Its color is not a truth. Perhaps I 
should be answered, that the fair white Carrara 
would be equally as unfaithful to the swart complex- 
ion of the great Constitutional Statesman ; yet it 
is the pleasantest delusion at least. Of course, 
bronze is the only material that can abide our cli- 
mate ; yet our great cities possess halls and other 
sheltering places, where the fatal frost and severe 
sun could not write their lines of change and 
decay, and the hall could be built for the statue, 
since, in its association, it would most commend 
itself to the popular favor. 

The day oi)ened, — so did not the clouds ; yet a 
darker shadow than this preceded the day, that 



WHO GOES THERE? 245 

memorable day, wlien Webster crowned Bunker 
Hill Monument. One need not wonder at the 
myriad of statues that are found in Athens and in 
Rome. Whenever an inauguration day was needed 
for them, a delicious sky looked down in soft ap- 
proval, while Grecian girls and Roman ladies 
looked up with delight. We have faint promise 
of any such carnival of weather when our holi- 
days of public gathering come. The New York 
State Agricultural Fair has been the occasion of 
an elaborate study of meteorology. 

This was a famous historical day in Boston. 
The " settlement " of Boston was two hundred and 
twenty-nine years old. Very absurd it was in the 
people of this peninsula, on the 17th day of Sep- 
tember, 1630, to vote away from themselves the 
Indian-born designation of Shawmut, and in its 
place to bestow on themselves, on their picturesque 
peninsular home, the copy of an English village, 
itself bearing the name, decayed and dusted, from 
that of old Saint Botolph. But what right has 
any man of a state or city which obliterated its 
first nomenclature before the alternate titles of the 
Duke of York, to make this criticism ? Remem- 
bering Man-hat- ta, silence best becomes " the oc- 
casion." 

The bells rang out this morning from steeples 
that have shaken with peals proclaiming peace or 



246 WHO GOES THERE? 

announcing victory. The voice of tlie cannon 
spoke out the birthda}^ of the city. I found, in 
the midst of the pouring rain, a positive pleasure 
in witnessing what beauty of arrangement the city 
had made. 

The preparations for this celebration had been 
elaborate. With the English idea of thorou^h- 
ness, which Boston has inherited and preserved, 
the structures for the accommodation of the spec- 
tators are strongly built, so that a delightful period 
in an address shall not find for its reward a grand 
crash instead of a plaudit. The Bostonians have 
a special talent in celebrations. Being orderly, 
they arrange pageants and processions without 
danger of roughs or rowdies ; being intelligent, 
they have read and remembered, and compile the 
affair with attention to effect ; being educated, 
they understand when the festivals in the year, 
worthy of pageant, come round. 

The entire area of the State House grounds 
was covered with a platform, of course immense 
in capacity, and with comfort of seat and protec- 
tion of rail, and flowers well watered. In the 
centre was the Statue, to the inauguration of 
which this day was to be devoted. The entire 
structure was surrounded with a drapery of green 
and purple, so that all the look of " shantyism " 
was lost. If but the sun of Italy had been the 



WHO GOES THERE f 247 

sky-genius of the occasion ! On my way tliither, 
I passed the statue of Frankhn. The old man 
bore the rain hke a philosopher, as he was. Down 
his bronze cheek and over his brazen nose fell the 
drops ; but he who sent a line to the electric cloud 
was not to soften beneath the shower. Despite 
the wet, a group of enthusiastic boys were explain- 
ing to each other the scenes of his science and his 
mechanics and statesmanship displayed on the pan- 
elling of the pedestal. The statue of Washing- 
ton was safe and dry in a crypt of the hall ; and 
thus we were spared the pain of witnessing the 
undignified spectacle of a dripping Father of his 
Country. I like that calm, cold crypt in which 
Canova's work is placed, with the gravestone of 
the English ancestral home of the Washingtons 
before it. It is a refuge for one's quiet thought 
and day-dream of Presidential dignity. 

On this seacoast a north-east storm means some- 
thing. In some other places, as by the shores of 
the lakes fo Western New York, it is a power, a 
bath, a sunshine smile ; but the smiles are not seen 
here. The cloudy curtain drew its fold thicker 
and closer. Soldiers and citizens, societies and 
associations, the strength and beauty of the city, 
doubted the wisdom of walking throuo-h the rain. 
Yet the preparations went on. Again the bells 
rung and the cannon fired, and sexton and gunner 



248 WHO GOES THERE f 

did tlieir duty in their voices of peace and war. 
It was an affair which could not be postponed. 
Fortunately, in a great city there are great roof- 
ings, and shelter is for the many as well as for the 
few ; and so the orders issued, that leaving behind 
the spacious and well-arranged platform, where the 
statue should stand in the midst of the multitude, 
the audience should be gathered in the Music Hall. 

Mr. Everett had anticipated this ; for, as the 
party most interested, he had probably acutely 
watched the weather ; and, as he had spoken such 
charming words of the skies and tlieir starry archi- 
tecture, he might be supposed to be tlieir familiar. 
I had seen a note from him, in which he says, — 
" From present appearances, the exercises will 
have to be in the Music Hall, which, so far as I 
am concerned, I do not regret." 

He knew that the open air is the most severe 
ordeal for oratory ; that to lose the voice in the 
horizonless circle before him, is to lose its com- 
mand ; that the effort is to reach the greatest dis- 
tance, and that the finer tones of the voice are 
injuriously affected by this. Our American ora- 
tors have, in this, a very severe trial ; and it is a 
great tribute to their power, that they have so 
often succeeded. It has been their lot to talk to 
their fellow-men in field and forest, in all the 
wild accompaniment of the barbacue, and in the 



WHO GOES- THERE ? 249 

blended multitude of opposing parties ; so that 
American eloquence has had all the education of 
Demosthenes by the raging sea-side. 

The Legislature, in full attendance, in defiance 
of the storm, marched from the State House to the 
hall, with an escort of soldierly men, who feared 
no elemental strife, and to the sounds of music 
that cheered us in the gloom. On these law- 
makers of Massachusetts moved. Their o-entlemen 
of the white rod kept all in place ; and following 
them, as one walks safely near so much of power, 
I found access to the hall. 

This Music Hall has ample dimension ; and on 
platform and on floor and in galleries gave con- 
venient place for hearing. At first the attendance 
was small, for the honorable legislators had arrived 
early ; but w^e thus had time to look around, and 
see wdioever of greatness should come among the 
audience, — such being the reward of the punctual. 
The galleries, appropriated to the ladies, were soon 
filled ; showing the varied hues of ornament, which 
alike in saloon where it cannot rain, and in any 
country at the height of the wet season, the ladies 
will wear, having excellent reasons for such conduct, 
quite above the dull comprehension of man. In 
poured the sohd and the fragile men of Boston, 
and the great hall soon showed that spectacle, 
always so impressive, of a vast crowd, a mighty 



250 WHO GOES THERE f 

concourse. They filled the building from floor to 
roof, and this, too, in a day when every consid- 
eration of comfort pointed to the inside of one's 
home. 

The arrival of one man told the reason why that 
crowd was there. It was Edward Everett; and 
when he entered, the multitude realized that they 
were to be rewarded for all frowning of the gloomy 
sky. He had unusual difficulties before him in 
this oration, — not of the subject, for that was of 
the grandeur to which his mind came by step of 
nature, — but because the mind of all the country 
had thought it out and spoken it out. He had 
himself spoken of it repeatedly. But it was a 
theme involvino; discrimination and delineation of 
qualities existing beyond the hour. Mr. Webster's 
fame was of the blended statesman and philoso- 
pher, and needed the analysis of a master hand. 

As soon as the rush of human beings had been 
calmed into order, a quarter door of lattice-work, 
at the rear of the platform, was thrown open, and 
then rolled forth the grand harmonies of the 
organ (not the organ which is now the glory of 
that hall), in its power swelling or soothing, as the 
score demanded. I have heard, when there were 
but very few present, the sweetness of the organ's 
note, as, with a master of the art at the keys, the 
hymn of the plaintive P ley el was breathed softly 



WHO GOES THERE? 251 

and solemnly. It was, in contrast to this, to hear 
its streno;th over such a concourse. 

And then a marshal, with a golden wand, 
brought the assemblage to due order, and prayer was 
made. A .prayer is never a subject for criticism. 
A good prayer is neither long nor declarative ; nor 
does it anticipate speech or sermon. The words 
of a prayer, we are wisely told, should be " few 
and well chosen." 

Professor Felton, of Harvard, as the chairman 
of the committee under whose action the statue 
had been made, made the formal presentation to 
Mayor Lincoln. The Professor was interesting 
and classical, and spoke as a college-man should 
speak. His historical allusions were precise, and 
the more valuable because fully measured before 
uttered. 

The Mayor and Governor Banks did admirably 
their duty in the order of the proceedings. Both 
are living, and out of the plan of this volume ; 
and long, long delayed may be the duty of their 
biographer, who shall await that which is the only 
proper theme, a completed and concluded career. 

Mr. Everett was not introduced, nor was there 
need of it. When he rose, such welcome was 
given him as would have taken the impediment 
from the tongue of Demosthenes. It was a wel- 
come to be prized, for it was that of a vast throng 



252 WHO GOES THERE? 

of educated and intelligent men ; and what made 
it of higher value, it was given him at his own 
home. He must have felt the worth of this, 
deeply. His address has passed into volume, and 
is of that series of Public Discourses which form 
Mr. Webster's proudest monument. It has re- 
ceived the approbation of those who value, and 
who know how to value, the words that are born 
of intellect. His voice was excellent, and it grew 
clearer to the close. Often hearing him, he 
seemed to me, on this occasion, unusually earnest 
in gesture, his delivery reaching, at times, the 
fervid in character. I had been anxious to hear 
him at Boston, and amidst his associations of 
friends, as I had in places remote and among stran- 
gers. He proved himself here, as everywhere, the 
same glowing, winning, charming orator. 

Now, to me, the amazing feature of his address 
was in this : I knew that he was not speaking all 
that he had prepared, as he had shown me, in his 
library, the day previous, the manuscript; and he 
had, in relation to this, written a note, which is 
before me, in which he says : '^ Being a good 
deal too long to be spoken in extenso, I shall only 
be able to speak parts of it to-day, in some portions 
an abridgment. This will give it rather a frag- 
mentary and occasionally meagre appearance." 

The circumstances of the day and the changed 



WHO GOES THERE f 253 

programme caused him to add other portions ap- 
propriate to the hour. 

Here was that wonderful memory, beyond all 
ordinary rule of tenacity, able not only to hold all, 
but to take up and let go, at pleasure, parts sep- 
arate and removed from each other, destroying all 
reliance on continuity of connection or association, 
never resorting to note or memorandum, but faith- 
ful in all. Let any one who doubts the difficulty 
of this, try the task of placing in his memory a 
series of stanzas, and then to repeat them, omitting 
several at irregular intervals. 

Some passages in this discourse were received 
with applause that was rapturous and resistless. 
When he used the nautical figure of Webster, as a 
ship-of-the-line going into battle, he touched the 
hearts of these dwellers by the sea, — those familiar 
wdth oakum and tar, — and I surmised one enthusi- 
astic, bald-headed gentleman, wdio leaned frantically 
forward, to be a shipcaptain, or the owner of a 
yacht, he seemed so to delight in the picture. 

I never heard, in all oratory, anything more dra- 
matic than Mr. Everett's recitation of the parable 
of the Pharisee and the Publican. It was wonderful, 
and I place it in my memory as the most impressive 
giving- forth of Scripture that I ever heard. In 
describing this afterward, I ventured to say, that 
he must forgive one of the most sincere of his ad- 



254 WHO GOES THERE? 

mirers in doubting the exactness of propriety in 
thm using the Holy Word ; as, while the effect 
which he desired by the illustration was produced, 
there seemed to be an oblique direction given to 
the great thought. Subsequently, he wrote to 
me : "I did not intend, in my use of the parable of 
the Pharisee and the Publican, to wander from the 
intent in which it was spoken by the Great 
Teacher ; and I think I could show you that I 
have not done so. The intent of the parable is 
not to teach that moral deficiency is a matter of 
indifference, but that censure ought to come only 
from the pure. I have never known Mr. Webster 
to be reviled by any man whom I supposed to be 
better than himself." 

The audience were evidently delighted with the 
discourse. Their attention was fixed and absorb- 
ing even amidst the reasoning and argumentative 
portions, and to every climax or picture passage, 
the enthusiastic voices rose in uncontrollable emo- 
tion. I admired, but could not quite concede, his 
desponding, but beautifully expressed, judgment, 
of the fate of inventors, as instanced in the de- 
cision of the Supreme Court of the United States 
against Robert Fulton, when he claimed the exclu- 
sive right to navigate, by use of steam, the Hud- 
son. No ; though Fulton was poor, and John 
Fitch died a maniac, other and brighter pages are 



WHO GOES THERE f 255 

road by invention in tliis age of clearer view and 
truer judgment. Ask McCormick whether his 
reaper has not had golden harvest ; Morse, whether 
the magnet has not attracted to him gold as well 
as iron ; Howe, whether the " tread " of the sew- 
ing-machine is not for him over pavement of coin. 

A brief time before he closed, the shadows of 
the premature evening came over the hall. The 
light of day waned and faded as I have seen it 
pass from the rich and varied tintings of cathedral 
windows. The great crowd, in shade, but not in- 
distinct, heeded no departure of the day. To 
them and before them, the intellectual hght had 
not set. Soon far up, nigh to the roof of the hall, 
sprung into brilliancy one jet after another, till the 
vast building seemed to have put on a coronal of 
lioht. The statue of Beethoven received the lus- 
tre on its bronze drapery ; the upturned faces of 
the audience brightened, and a soft veil of light 
was over orator and hearer. The picture seemed 
suddenly painted, as accompaniment to the beauty 
of the words that were in utterance. 

With the close of Mr. Es^erett's discourse, the 
great crowd rushed, delighted and instructed, to 
the pitiless north-easter, which roared and moaned 
in these streets, as though we were in the Fitful 
Head where Noma dwelt. 

We are but as yesterday from the sight of thq 



256 WHO GOES THERE ^ 

national honors so gracefully accorded to Mr. 
Everett at his death. The more carefully cultured 
laurel of the historian will, in due time, be placed 
over his grave. In the memory of the hundreds 
of thousands, his voice will be their ideal of the 
beautiful in oratory ; and in whatever department 
of human action he moved, a just estimate of him 
will concede, that he achieved success as useful as 
it was great. 

Mr. Sheridan said that his own master passion 
was vanity, — that he could conquer all others. In 
the far-off look, but attentive, however distant, 
that I have had of the very great men of this 
country, I should say that it was just the reverse 
of this w^ith them. They do not seem to have 
fully estimated the grandeur of their own position, 
and w^ere annoyed or disturbed at the lesser causes 
which wound around them, without feeling (as the 
People felt and as History will make record) how 
vastly above all this their station in the truth of 
fame Avas. Even the majestic George Washing- 
ton, who mingled very carefully with his fellow- 
men, was indignant at the articles about himself in 
the opposition newspapers ; while Mr. Clay and 
Mr. Webster, with all their greatness, never saw, 
as the world around them saw clearly, and as is 
even now blazing in the light of history, how 
much greater honor the heart-given support of 



WHO GOES THERE? 257 

friends, than all the majorities the Electoral Col- 
lege ever heard figured ; and Mr. Everett, so 
accomplished and cultm-ed in the experiences of 
the world, was greatly provoked at the injustice of 
a portion of the press toward him, — annoyed at 
articles which nobody ever remembered. In a letter 
to me, he says : " What does a little surprise and a 
good deal grieve me is, that conservative and 
friendly journals, with a very few exceptions, look 
calmly on and see this unexampled warfare waged 
upon me, in violation of all the established rules 
of journalism. Pardon me this burst of human 
feeling. You have observed me long enough to 
know that I am tolerably impassive ; but the glacier 
at length melts." 
17 



CHAPTER YII. 

FROM DANIEL WEBSTER TO ZACHARY TAYLOR. 



F those who, at this day, hear the friends 
of Daniel Webster speak of him in terms 
of admiration, so warm and so earnest as 
to seem exaggerated, imagine that it is but 
in the distance of the years that such 
things are said ; that it is only in the mist 
of time, which conceals defect and brightens 
virtue, that he is seen as a colossal man ; they do 
the judgment and the accuracy of those friends in- 
justice. While Mr. Webster lived, — as he moved 
majestically among men, in his progress to and 
from Washington, in his seat in the Senate, in his 
chair at the State oflftce, at Marshfield, in Beacon 
Street, at the Astor House, — everywhere Mr. 
Webster was surrounded by a company of at- 
tached, devoted, absorbed men, who knew that they 
were the friends, chosen and cherished, of a man 
who, in intellectual strength, had not his equal in 
all the wide, wide New World ; and in their friend- 
ship, they were sacrificing, persevering, unchang- 

(258) 



WHO GOES THERE f 259 

ing. They believed that the Presidency was due 
to him, and for it they waged a contest which 
ended only as his life ended. I saw these devoted 
friends at the Convention of 1852, at Baltimore. 
They labored with a zeal and a courage that w^s 
proudest of all tributes to the grandeur of the man 
who could deserve or win such service. What a 
scene that was when Choate was selected to make 
the champion speech, which should tell the nation 
of the pubhc service of the man around whom 
they clustered iike the men of Moidart around 
Charlie ! That wildly picturesque face, its brilliant 
eye, — the face that would have been seen and 
noticed in a crowd of ten thousand, — how boldly 
that voice called the tumultuous Convention to tlie 
order of the fixed attention that eloquence extorts 
even from those who shtit their hearts to the truth ! 
I ought to remember well, and I do so, when 
I first saw Daniel Webster ; for his, certainly, is 
one of the greatest of the historic names of the 
annals of this country. June 17, 1843, was 
selected as the time when the top-stone was to be 
placed on the Monument at Bunker Hill. It was, 
as it might be said', the sunset hour of revolution- 
ary association. It Avas expected to be the last, 
the final, the farewell gathering of those who had 
been the living and moving, the strugghng and the 
suffering actors in that day, which, as we now see 



260 WHO GOES THERE f 

it, opened a new era in the movements of mankind, 
and initiated a new epoch. 

Among those whom I found travelhng toward 
Boston, I found, coming into the cars at Cayuga 
BU'idge, Josiah Cleveland, who had acted as ensign 
in the field of the battle day, and who, at the siege 
and capitulation of Yorktown, had been captain. 
He was a man of imposing presence, firm and 
commanding way, with costume in fitting taste for 
an aged man. He was then ninety years of age. 
The home of his old age was on the banks of the 
Susquehanna, at Owego, near the sweet cottage, 
Glen Mary, made famous by Mr. Willis' inter- 
esting delineation of its incidents 'as his resi- 
dence. Mr. Cleveland came into the cars, and 
when asked, by some one in the train, where he 
was going, — '' To Bunker Hill," said he, promptly, 
as recognizing only the geography of the Revolu- 
tion. His was a long journey for one so old, yet 
he bore it, continued as it was all night, and he 
reached Boston safely, — reached it, never to re- 
turn from it. The reaction, after all the fatigue, 
ended his life. He was buried at Mount Auburn, 
and the liberality of some of the liberal men of 
Boston gave him appropriate monument, which is 
to-day one of the very many interesting sepulchral 
records of that fairest of all the grave-homes of the 
land. 



WnO GOES THERE? 261 

The day before the festival, the 16th, was a 
gloomy one. The hotels, and indeed all Boston, 
were crowded, and it rained savagely, just as it 
can rain on the seacoast, where the east wnid 
seems the cup-bearer to the earth, and fond of its 
duty of libation. "Shall to-morrow be as this 
day '? " was the question which citizen and stran- 
ger asked ; and we studied the sky with an earnest- 
ness which is the characteristic of that department 
of meteorology whose problem is but to solve the 
time of the vapor. ^ 

We were somewhat enlivened by the arrival ot 
President Tyler, who, when he came, certainly 
did not find a dry eye in the assemblage that sur- 
rounded his carriage. He was surrounded by his 
cabinet, of whom the most resistless intellect was 
our own John C. Spencer. Legr^, of South Caro- 
lina, the brUliant and eloquent scholar and civilian, 
came also, and never returned, — as he found, m 
that time of festivity, the appointed time for his 

mortality. 

There were, also, arrivals of private gentlemen, 
who had celebrity of association. Among these 
was the venerable Nicholas Van Rensselaer, ot 
Greenbush, opposite Albany, the gentleman who 
wa^ in 1T77, selected by General Schuyler to act 
as the aide-de-camp in escort of General Burgoyne 
from Saratoga to the superb hospitality of the 
Schuvler mansion at Albany. 



262 WHO GOES THEUE? 

The ITtli came, and somewhere I heard a band 
playing the barque carol, " Behold how brightly 
breaks the morning ! " and it was so true, that we 
could have embraced that band from bassoon to 
triangle. Boston was instantly radiant. The Com- 
mon gleamed green glories in its freshly-bathed 
verdure, and everywhere flags floated and bayonets 
glittered, and the people of the city seemed re- 
lieved ; having, probably, as is the case with most of 
us in our home-gala days, taken upon themselves 
the conduct of the weather as an individual responsi- 
bility. The atmosphere had been pleasantly cooled 
by the rain, and there were just clouds enough, in 
the beautiful blue above us, to curtain off the sum- 
mer sun. It was a day for a great fete, and the 
people accepted the delightful gift. 

In the morning, the President held levee at the 
Tremont. Boston had prepared for the Chief 
Magistrate of the United States a luxurious suite 
of rooms. We read, as from the Court Circular, 
of the damask and marbles and chandeliers and 
vases and claret and gold and green of tlie orna- 
ments and decorations. I do not mean to con- 
demn this. At that time it was less in the line of 
life, public or private, to be as ornate, but our plain 
and simple theory is but a theory. The taste for. 
display, for magnificence, is in the people. It is so 
in wedding procession to the chancel, in funeral 
cortege to the tomb. 



WHO GOES THERE f 263 

At the levee I saw Colonel Miller, whose name 
is famous in the history of the war of 1812, be- 
cause, when General Jacob Brown asked him if 
he would take a certain battery, his modest answer 
(followed by his successful storming of it) was, 
" I'll try, sir," — words which became a motto of 
soldierly daring. 

There was something of English arrangements 
for the seeing of the procession. Eligible places 
were offered to rent. I noticed that a very con- 
venient gallery of this kind was ingeniously placed 
on a part of the " Old South," which, if it was 
intended to .accommodate the minister and elders 
of that time-honored sanctuary, showed an anxiety 
for the care of the nierarchy well becoming the 
City of the Pilgrims. 

There was the utmost order in the crowd which 
awaited the procession's coming. It was like the 
order in the streets of Montreal as the Prince of 
Wales moved through, and like the good regula- 
tion of the streets of Albany as the funeral pag- 
eant of the murdered President was borne along. 
Every window of every house along the line of 
the route was thronged, from the paper pasteboard 
to the plate glass. I was amused at seeing the 
perplexed toll-gatherer of Warren Bridge endeav- 
oring to collect his lawful dues from each pedes- 
trian, while the vast crowd, in so many ways. 



2C4 WHO GOES THERE f 

went all around liim. The Revenue Cutter, Cap- 
tain Sturgis, beautifully decorated with flags, was 
moored at the precise spot, where, on the day of 
the battle, the British vessel, the Glasgow, lay, and 
from whence it cannonaded the Heights. Among 
other banners, this vessel bore the famous old pine- 
tree banner of ancient Massachusetts. 

Just at the side of the monument, which, in ex- 
pedient taste, had no other decoration than four 
flags pointing to each compass direction, was ar- 
ranged an immense amphitheatre of seats, which 
were already thronged with the daughters of the 
land, who had come at an early hour, and who, 
whatever might be their faint chance of seeing, 
had the luxury of being seen ; and this is a chap- 
ter in the great book of the compensations of life, 
which deserves to be looked at very carefully and 
written about ingeniously. 

Some of the sovereign people did not relish the 
military discipline which kept the space open and 
clear till the arrival of the President. I was 
amused at the quaint remark of an old gentleman, 
who had been made to walk out of the forbidden 
ground in gentle quick time, that there were " as 
many slaves here as there were on the day of the 
battle." 

The scene at the Monument was of the great 
pictures that history paints : the blue sky above, — 



WffO GOES THEME f 265 

the mighty Monument seeking the upper air, its 
four streamers pointing to every quarter of this 
free land, the colors of star and stripe exquisitely 
in contrast with the azure of the heavens, — at the 
base of the Monument all the different hues of 
the varied dresses of the thousands of ladies, — a 
garden of living flowers. 

Mr. Webster felt the impulse of the hour ; and 
its incidents would have stirred the livinor heart of 
any man ; certainly of him who was selected from 
amidst all the nation to speak the words that 
should enshrine that hour. The crowd before him 
was vast. It was a great gathering from lands re- 
mote and near ; for, to this hour, the attention of 
the whole people had been awakened. The Pres- 
ident of the United States and his cabinet were at 
his side. It was the homage of the power of place 
to the power of mind. And he was surrounded 
also by those whom only this scene could have de- 
layed in their movement to the grave. The vicin- 
age of the opening battle-fields of the Revolution 
were represented by numbers whose feeble life ener- 
gies culmniated in the effort to reach this day and 
place. There were one hundred and eleven veri- 
table revolutionary soldiers present. Of these, the 
youngest man was seventy-four. (^He must have 
been a ve7y young soldier, if he took part in the 
Revolution.) Four of them, — the Harringtons, 



266 WHO GOES THERE? 

Bigelow, and Johnson, — had been in the opening 
skirmishes of Concord and Lexington, — those 
morning guns of a long roll of war, which has 
had faint and few intervals of silence from that 
hour. 

I am a little incredulous about revolutionary 
certificates, — but one of these men, Levi Harring- 
ton, seems to have been of the two who signed a 
brief note mentioning April 25, 1775, the Lexing- 
ton affair. 

There was a preliminary prayer, made by a 
gentleman who had written a history of the battle. 
When the corner-stone, in 1824, was laid, the 
opening prayer was made by the Rev. Mr. Thax- 
ter, wdio, fifty years previous, as chaplain of Pres- 
cott's regiment, had made the prayer just before 
the fight. In 1824, he was the only survivor of the 
regiment ; the hearers of his former prayer were 
all in the grave ; he and the Being whom he ad- 
dressed w^ere alone. 

There w^as great kindness shown to visitors on 
this occasion, and I found, through the kindness 
of Josiah Quincy, Jr., a place on the platform, 
where I could write, and from whence I could see 
Mr. Webster very distinctly. His sentences were 
so well made, having such completeness of ar- 
rangement, that he was an easy man to report ; 
but my attention was drawn from the words to 



WHO GOES THERE? 2G7 

tlie orator. He had the sagacity, — for, in Mr. 
Webster there always seemed to be plan and pur- 
pose, and lience I could not use the Avord tact^ as 
I should in the case of Mr. Clay, — he had the 
sagacity to avail himself of all the positions of the 
day, of what it presented to oratory ; so he made 
glowing welcome to the old soldiers; he was grand 
about the battle, about our nationality ; he de- 
clared that, in the event of the dissolution of the 
Union, he would avert his eyes from it forever. 
He aroused, to all the grandeur of a demonstration, 
the crowd, by his bright words concerning Washing- 
ton. At this word of love and honor concernino- 
the grand old Virginian, the tumultuous plaudits of 
the crowd could not be restrained, and somebody 
shouted out, " Three cheers, three cheers all over 
the world I " A proposition which the then 
densely-crowded area of Bunker Hill agreed to, 
and fulfilled to the strength of their voices; and the 
sound of a mighty multitude has always in it the 
majestic. 

So soon as the oration was concluded, the Presi- 
dent of the United States rose, and, as I thought 
at the time of observing it, very gracefully con- 
gratulated Mr. Webster ; and his example was fol- 
lowed by his cabinet ; and througliout the con- 
course there was a stir and a sensation, as if they 
had been in themselves somewhat of history that 
day. 



268 WHO GOES THERE f 

There was a great banquet, in the evening, at 
Faneuil Hall ; and without departing from the 
limitations of this work, it is curious record to make, 
that, on that occasion, the toast given by President 
Tyler was, " The Union, — union of purpose, union 
of feeling, — the Union established by our fathers." 
The toast given almost at the initiative of the 
feast, was, " South Carolina and Massachusetts, — 
shoulder to shoulder they went through the Revo- 
lution, laying up for each other great treasures of 
glory ; the sons never will divide the great inherit- 
ance." And Mr, Upshur, of Virginia, the then 
Secretary of the Treasury, gave, as his sentiment, 
" Massachusetts, — foremost in the conflict by 
which our liberties were won, and foremost to 
show us what our liberties are when won." 

A day so magnificent, its celebration became a 
renewed era in the history of Boston. The old 
soldiers went home to die ; the Monument was 
completed record, and the last chapter of Revolu- 
tionary companionship was finished. 

Mr. Webster was a man who, to such a prepared 
and anticipated event, would bring all the intellect- 
nal power that the hour required. He was best in 
these, because he prepared with full sense of the 
value of that which was before him as his duty, 
and he thought of the after-study of his words ; 
and hence it was his design that they should be 



WHO GOES THERE f 269 

worthy of tliat study. Mr. Clay thought of the 
effect ; and the one saw mankind as his students,— 
the other, as his sokliers. Mr. Webster had greater 
ideas of the dignity of reason. Mr. Clay desired 
to mould the men before him to his sway, and in 
their impulses his own kindled and grew larger 
and greater. I have heard Mr. Webster when I 
did not especially care to hear longer at that time. 
I never heard Mr. Clay but that all else, hunger 
or occupation, was forgotten in the wish to hear 
more from /izm. 

I saw Mr. Webster enter the superbly decorated 
dining-room of the Astor House, when a banquet 
was given by the St. Nicholas Society to the officers 
of a'^Netherlands man-of-war, and, heralded by 
the graceful and winning voice of Ogden Hoffman, 
itself a perpetual pleasure, he rose to the hour 
■ in wise and worthy word of welcome to the Hol- 
lander ; and so, that evening, the mariners of the 
• land that has to fight the sea itself, saw and heard 
the best representative of New England, and the 
brightest and most distinguished of those whose 
ancestors had thought it a pleasant filial tribute to 
give the land to which Hendrick Hudson had 
piloted them, the name of New Netherlands. 

For such a scene as this, Ogden Hoffman was most 
fehcitous of chairmen. As the Scotch ballad says,— 
" His very voice had music in it," . 



270 WHO GOES THERE? 



and he knew what word was most in unison with 
the sparkle of the hour. " Often, often," said he, 
*' have we had in our festivals brilhants, jewelry 
of intellect, but never, till this hour, could I pre- 
sent to you, as I do now, the Koh-i-noor, the 
Mountain of Light ! " And then rose Web- 
ster, and, with that grandly grave superiority 
which so well became him^ centred at once the 
attention of all. I doubt not our guests, in their 
quiet houses by the dykes, often recall that even- 
ing ; and, as they remember its hospitalities, breathe 
kindly wish for the welfare of those who would 
not forget that something in them yet toned to the 
memories ot the traditions of the land that loves 
and fears the ocean. 

That was a famous evenincr when Mr. Webster 
presided over the assembled literati, who gathered 
to do honor to the memory of America's greatest 
author, James Fennimore Cooper. I think it was 
very honorable to Mr. Webster that he was thus 
called to preside, for the guild of letters had many 
high and honorable names in their own right, there 
assembled. Dressed in that buff and blue, which 
belonged to him, as thoroughly as one of these 
colors was the bado-e of those fost friends of Mi. 
Fox, who were toasted by Mrs. Crewe, he Avas 
soon interested in the scene, as all the audience 
were iij him ; and as Mr. Irving, just as quick as 



WHO GOES THERE t 271 

possible, made brief announcement of tbe purposes 
of the evening, the Statesman called forth the 
men whose names were the head and front and 
heart of the literature of America. 

I saw him at the time, — a worn, wasted old 
man, — comino; slowlv down the staircase of the 
Astor House. It was the other side to the grand 
Statesman, and the equipage of the evening, rising, 
by the strength of his broad and philosophical in- 
tellect, above all the rank that letters confer. Per- 
haps it was not in all the proprieties of the event, 
that any other but a great author should have 
been the leading mind in the funeral honor of the 
author who had established for his country so high 
a place in the world's literature ; yet it was to be 
seen in another light, and in that view where could 
the greatest Statesman of the Union be most ap- 
propriately prominent, but at this tribute to the 
greatest of the literary men of the Republic. 

I left Mr. Clay's side (and I speak this of my- 
self only because I believe that in it I represented 
the mass who stood around me) willing to do any- 
thing, be anything, he wished me to do, or that 
would win trium]:)h for him. I left Mr.. Webster 
strong, and convinced that he had the right and 
deserved the victory; but there might be doubt 
about the full duty of self-sacrifice to promote that 
end. 



272 WJJO GOES THERE f 

I reoret that I never saw Mr. Calhoun, because 
he was, in the universal acceptation of his day, a 
man who deserved the first place among statesmen. 
Those who knew him tell me of the intense devo- 
tion to him personally which characterized his fol- 
lowers, and that, when he died, the leachng men 
who had made him their master, indicated all the 
personal sorrow that, of old, the clans had in the 
hour of the passing away of a chieftain. 

To no man is there such universal testimony 
of wonderful power given as has reached me on 
all sides concerning the oratory of Sargeant S. 
Prentiss. It is fame of the highest order to be 
avouched, as he has been, in the grandeur of elo- 
quence, of that might of the intellect which made 
the multitude, educated or unlearned, confess their 
willing thraldom. Mr. Everett described to me 
interestingly the great effect which Prentiss pro- 
duced on himself when he first heard him at Fan- 
euil Hall ; and, said Mr. Everett, I heard him at 
the close of a fatigued dinner, when others 
who had preceded him had taken more than their 
share of the time, and I turned to Mr. Webster, 
who sat next me, to express my delight, and Mr. 
Webster declared that Prentiss was alivays thus. 
Equal praise proceeded to him from Charles King, 
whose life has given him the best, opportunity 
to hear the best men. When Prentiss was dis- 



n-jiL. OuJiis ThliliEt i;<3 

covered as a passenger on board of or,o of tne 
Mississippi steamboats, at a side-nver town, the 
crowd insisted on his speaking. He addressed 
them ; and the crowd were in the spell of the 
ina-ician as the engineer of the boat appeared and 
declared that he bad held the rush of the steam 
back as long as was possible to prevent mterrup- 
tion by the noise, and that it must now escape, or 
the boiler burst. All the answer he got from 
the charmed crowd was, " Let it burst." 

Of the Bar, I saw most of those who gave 
dio-nity to the profession, whose theory is, — the 
most skilful and accurate analysis of proof, m evi- 
dence and fact, to develop the truth, - a theory 
which, like many texts in sermons, is preached 
from. I was most impressed with William H. 
Maynard, who died at the very initiation of the 
career of a very great man. He was counsel m a 
cause when I had an interest to see him unsuccess- 
ful ; but, in face of all my wishes, my Justus 
could not deny him the plaudit of greatness. He 
seemed to be a master, adroit and learned, and ot 
that class of men who make reason of assertion, -- 
who so frame their words as that they are invinci- 
ble in demonstration as they move on. 

Nicholas Hill was a name of eminence beyond 
its lustre in the circles of legal lore that form at 
the Capitol, in the place where the highest judici- 

18 



274 WHO GOES THERE f 

ary sits in deliberation. In the study of every 
couriselior in Kew iTorK, ana m many beyond the 
confines of the great State, — indeed, of every one 
conversant with the best of his great profession, — 
the name of this gentleman was uttered with re- 
spect, indeed, with admiration, and the tidings 
of his death — his clock of time ceasing its move- 
ment while yet the noon of intellect was at Its 
height — came like the sudden alarm of the niMit. 
He died in the advance of his learning, and in the 
onward step. The brain that admitted the fatal 
heat of the fever was already warm with the glow 
of study, and death came by the door which himself 
had opened widest ; and in the augmenting of the 
treasures of his learning, he died amidst its accu- 
mulations. 

It was to me always a scene of Interest to witness 
the fixed attention with which the Court of Ap- 
peals listened to him. I so often see those wearied 
and much-enduring eight forced to pay the homage 
of the outward ear to counsel whose arguments 
are but assertions, and points dulness, that to see 
this exchanged for an impressed, interested defer- 
ence is a relief. It Is as if some Indulgence had 
been granted to the tasked laborer. 

That court knew that Mr. Hill was a lawyer. In 
the high sense of that word ; that the flame he lit 
before them was of beaten oil ; that the argument 



WEO GOES THERE 1 2^75 

he formed for their consideration deserved it, and 
that they might well tread that path of authorities, 
to the doctrines and conclusions of which he cited 
them. They heard, as, of old, Spencer heard 
Henry, as Van Ness heard Wells, as, in date more 
remote. Jay heard Hamilton. Rising above and 
going beyond the hasty and half-considered con- 
duct of a cause, rather than its preparation, Mr. 
Hill revived the day of the sound student of the 
law, who had, with that philosophy which is the 
clear glass that learning in all departments of its 
action uses, investigated, analyzed, /orTnec? the law, 
and was able to enunciate all its truths. 

Of pale, wan look, of feeble, shattered frame, 
the paralyzed arm giving gesture of imperfect 
movement, though of correct expression, he rose 
before the court like one who knew the dignity of 
the lawyer's art, and who knew, as observing men 
must know, that the master of the law is the mas- 
ter of our nature. 

What an array of counsel was gathered in the 
great North American Trust Company case ! 
What side of many-sided legal propositions was 
there but that lioht came on it thence ? It was a 
great gathering of the worthiest of those who 
grace the roll of the civilians of New York. 

Mr. Hill confined his practice to the highest 
court, and wisely ; for study, such as he gave, was 



276 WHO GOES THERE f 

remunerated only by a settlement of the question 
in review. He felt the majesty of the law. One 
of the last words I heard him utter was his re- 
mark to jne, as we talked of some decision where 
the court had been compelled to exercise its 
most disagreeable power, that of declaring the in- 
terpretation of some patronage-making law of a 
partisan legislature. He expressed his belief that 
the decision of the court would find acquiescence. 
*' We are a loyal people," said he. I did not 
think he was so soon thereafter to illustrate the 
universal loyalty of our race, — the homage to the 
grave. 

The life of William Curtis Noyes was closed in 
the zenith of his capacity to make it a most useful 
one. To have acted with him in the delineation 
of Mr. Storrs' career, would have been agreeable 
labor ; for its association with himself would have 
made the hours to be remembered most kindly. I 
liked the way in which Mr. Noyes dignified his 
own profession. He believed in its chivalry, in 
tracing back its wisdom in the long roll of grand 
jurists, and he thought their words the heritage of 
our own time. He was lofty in his ambition con- 
cerning the law, and used the fine intellect he 
possessed to make the place of the first counsel in 
the metropolis — if such honor he should ever 
s^ttain — something of a dignity, which, though 



WHO GOES THERE f 277 

robeless and unermined, should be a name for the 
respect of all men. 

Some of the most famous of the world-wide 
travellers I have seen. It would, probably, be a 
more valuable recollection, if I could state which 
of the two pioneers of the trans-Mississippi West, 
Lewis or Clarke, a venerable man, with whom the 
chances of packet-boat journeying brought me. 
He was pointed out at the time as worthy of a dis- 
tinct gaze. 

I met, at Cincinnati, a gentleman who recol- 
lected well, that when he was of the number of 
those who formed an unsuccessful expedition to 
accomplish the passage of the Yellow Stone river, 
Daniel Boone came down to the wharf, — a gentle, 
dignified, impressive old man, — to see the steam- 
boat bound on an expedition so far beyond the ut- 
most limit to which his step, so bold in all adven- 
ture that could prepare the way for civilization, 
had reached. 

John L. Stephens, who wrote that delightful 
book of travel in the Holy Land, was a genial and 
very agreeable gentleman, much more in his voca- 
tion as a traveller and an author, than in the dusty 
ways of statesmanship, where, as a member of the 
Constitutional Convention of 1846, I saw much 
of him. He had the kindly way of a man who 
has seen more than one chapter of human life, 



278 WHO GOES THERE f 

and I think had less of that cynicism, that univer- 
sal doubt of everybody, which appertains to great 
travellers, who, in the general wrong or insuffi- 
ciency, forget that they have passed through life 
rather than dwelt in it. 

But the name among travellers which is best 
known, by its deeply shadowed fate, is that of Sir 
John Franklin. While he was on his way over- 
land to the North, and then, I believe, in the 
duty, which the whole civilized world has assumed 
respecting himself, of a search after somebody 
'v\^io overstayed his time, and who, it was feared, 
was in p;reat want of food or warmth somewhere 
in the vast North, — I saw this distinguished ad- 
venturer at the rooms of the Albany Library. 

I believe the Albany Library rose out of a col- 
lection of books made by the officers of Fort 
Orange and Fort Frederick, in the day when those 
fortresses were the temporary home of the edu- 
cated English army officer, whose range of feasting 
and flirtation was not so great as to preclude the 
coming over him of ennui. Whether I am right in 
this idea of its origin or not, at the hour when the 
great Northman visited it, it was situated in the up- 
per story of a building since removed by the city, to 
give greater width to the river-end of State Street, or 
else in the space now included by the Exchange. 
It was before the ambition of Albany required a 



WHO GOES THERE? 279 

broader State Street ; and the ascent to this deposit 
of hterature was by a narrow and steep staircase, 
in ascending wliich the juveniles had the great ad- 
vantage, and of which, in a progress for the last 
" Waverley," that treasure always, we were not 
slow to avail ourselves. The librarian had the 
very name for profundity, — an unpronounceable 
German one. He was clever, that is, obliging, 
althou<xh not insensible to the annoyance of sue- 
cessive journeys to all the shelves, to suit the tastes 
of those visitors who, not finding " in " Ivanhoe or 
Rob Roy, and not having come with their literary 
appetite prepared for any other food, mumbled very 
miscellaneously. We knew just where the books 
were kept ; we were habitues, and were indulged, 
sometimes, I believe, to such luxury as to be 
allowed the privilege of leaping over the counter, 
and, by personal search, gratifying a taste that 
watched the arrival of every new book, " and 
there were giants in those days." 

It was while we were thus in predatory attend- 
ance on the librarian, that we saw enter the room, 
attended by a gentleman who then held distin- 
guished representative place in the National Gov- 
ernment, a grave, rather sad-looking gentleman, 
practical, compact, and dignified, who was made 
known to the custodian of the books, as Captain 
John Franklin. 



280 WHO GOES THERE f 

Like sensible boys, we turned from the written 
history to the Uving one ; for the reputation of 
Captain Franldin, as an Arctic traveller, was recog- 
nized, and Parry's voyages had made all reading 
people enthusiasts about whatever should find way 
into the crystal caverns of the Far North. He 
had been led to the library to consult an ancient 
black-covered volume, which was remembered by 
us as an old settler on the shelves, — one of those 
books which, like the works of the philosophers of 
Athens, everybody admires at a distance. Its 
subject was the form of the earth, and it had maps 
or charts which professed delineation of the near 
and remote portions of the globe. Captain Frank- 
lin seemed to understand, at a glance, that it pre- 
sented no fact, in its lines and figures, which could 
aid him, for he made a very brief inspection of 
the volume. Fortunately for us, he was at the 
room lonor enouo-h for us to obtain a careful look 
at him ; and it must have been an earnest im- 
pression, for, from that hour, my recollection of 
him has always been that of a man rather grave 
to sadness. I am sure I do not know why this 
should have been so then, for no seer stood at his 
side to tell him that, amidst starving followers and 
death-cold men, the then far-off summer days of 
1847 should bring him to his grave ; while, living 
or dead, the whole Christian world was giving 



WHO GOES THERE? 281 

wealth, and even life itself, to his rescue ; and that 
Heaven was to smile over the most rare Christian 
union of England and the United States and 
France in a work of love of man for his fellow- 
man. I should have gazed on him even more 
earnestly had I thought that in him such high 
humanity was to concentrate. Does any citizen 
of Albany know " what has become " of the book 
which he at that time consulted? 

Alexander Vattemare was a traveller of rare 
experiences, — a peculiar and rather an eccentric 
man, but very energetic and very persevering, and 
the cause of pleasant and profitable embassages of 
literature from one to the other of nations. Presi- 
dent, Emperor, Pope, King, and Czar were all his 
agents in furnishing to the libraries of each other 
the best books, — that is, the costly national vol- 
umes, — which their liberality prepared. He 
claimed to be the real author of the o-reat Interna- 
tional Exhibitions, and told me that it was a chap- 
ter in the world's injustice, that Prince Albert 
should have received so much commendation for 
this. He was an interesting talker. In the early 
period of his hfe, — as M. Alexander, — he had ac- 
quired great celebrity as a ventriloquist, and re- 
ceived the homage of an address, in verse, from 
Sir Walter Scott ; but even this, of wdiicli any 
man might have been proud, did not seem to recon- 



282 WHO GOES THERE t 

cile liim to any association with these memories. 
In his Album Cosmopohtique, there was abundant 
evidence that he had been a very successful and 
popular man. I recollect there was a superb por- 
traiture of his daughter, whom he seemed to guard 
carefully from association with his ventriloquial 
career. 

On one occasion he accompanied me to exam- 
ine, at my request, a superb engraving of the 
celebrities of the Court of Napoleon. He looked 
at them, but soon desisted, declaring that they pain- 
fully revived old memories. In a man of less real 
experience in the saloons of monarchs, this might 
have been a little out of taste, or absurd, but it 
was excusable in him. Returning up Lydius 
Street, Albany, that evening, in its shadows we 
saw the Roman Catholic cathedral, then in erec- 
tion. I shall never forget the truly Gallic ex- 
pression he used, in speaking of the size of the 
building. He stopped, looked at it, seemed im- 
pressed with its dimensions. " That is a very 
large church," said he, and made a short pause; 
'' but it could dance in some of ours in Paris.'^ 

He told me he had seen twentv-eiirht kino;s ; and 
after seeing thus about all there is on earth to see, 
he died, best remembered as having been tlie 
means of giving wider scope to the governmental 
literature of the nations of the earth, — a healthy 
and useful and honorable fame. 



WHO GOES THERE f 283 

I have heard that strange and useless visionary, 
Robert Owen, as he lectured on his problems of a 
better time coming for all men, — himself forget- 
ting, that in the wisdom which he neglected was 
the only guide to the happiness he proposed. There 
was nothing attractive about him as a lecturer ; and 
but for his reputation, one would not have cared to 
listen. He was permitted to use the Assembly 
chamber for his discourse, and he lived on in a 
hope of seeing a world coming to his theory. 

Why did he go thus about among nations that he 
must have seen rode under or over his theories every 
day ? Are not many theoretical-talking reformers, 
in their resultless efforts, only dispelling that within 
them which Miss Martineau calls "inborn ennuV^ 

Is not the calm life of quiet, which may not be 
heard beyond the walls of its earthly home, often 
of greater usefulness? There may be power, re- 
sistless power, in that which Lady Churchill's 
epitaph, at Lincoln, characterizes as a " gentle 
wafting to immortal life." Truth and steadfast- 
ness, in the smallest circle of friends, has a value 
that' is beyond great-reaching theories. I would 
rather see a child's look toward its mother than to 
hear lukewarm pliik3Soj)hy " crying to the moon 
and stars for impossible sympathy." 

There were some, most favored, individuals who 
brouo-ht back to us their recollections of Walter 



284 WHO GOES THERE? 

Scott, that greatest of writers since the Bard of 
Avon (which hitter exception is made as black 
mail to the world's opijiion, and not because I 
think so). I heard Mr. Irving's narrative of his 
unequalled days passed in the magician's own 
home-spell ; and Mr. George Ticknor's testimony 
to the fidelity of the original portrait of Sir Walter, 
which is over his hearth, and of which Mrs. Lock- 
hart said to Mr. Ticknor, that she could not for- 
give him for bearing away to America the best 
portrait of her father. Mr. Cobden told me, that 
when he visited Edinburgh, he made it his very 
grateful duty to find the great author ; and in 
searching for him, in his place at the Court, he 
discovered, after being directed to the sheriff, a 
heavy and not bright-looking gentleman at the 
desk, absorbed in clerical duties, and apparently 
not interested in what the Court was doing, till a 
sudden illumination of his face, at a wise or witty 
thing that was said by counsellor or judge, re- 
vealed the genius. 

But a queer testimony to the liberal hospitality 
of Abbotsford was related to me by a man whom I 
found in one of our western villao;es, and who 
claimed often to have seen Sir Walter. I, at first, 
doubted, thinking that such recollection might be 
the great card of all Scotchmen, and that it was 
prudent to cross-examine a little before listening to 



WHO GOES THERE? 285 

the relation. He claimed to be a son of the butcher 
at Melrose, and the suggestion gave a very prac- 
tical and work-day coloring to the moon-lit Abbey. 
" Yes," said he, " I often saw him. They ate a 
power of meat at Abbotsford, — often a whole 
sheep and sometimes a lamb." 

I was forced to believe in the story of another 
Scotchman, a stone-mason, who claimed to have 
assisted in the building of Abbotsford, by his say- 
ing, that '' it was a house of a great many cor- 
ners," for this delineation of its wayward architec- 
ture was too fiiithful to be doubted. 

These are all meagre incidents of any compan- 
ionship with those who knew Scott, by look or con- 
versation, personally ; but even these I cherished. 
It was a positive delight to look at that portrait in 
Mr. Ticknor's library, for it reflected the very 
man ; and 1 think the curiosity of all men, that 
have a i^eal love for literature, is intense yet to 
know all about him. Lockhart's biography, ad- 
mirable indeed, is yet a cold-blooded affair, and 
does not frame the generous and sjlad man in such 
coloring as his kind nature gave him title to. 

What a succession of triumphs the Waverleys ! 
What books ever were there which so imbued 
the mind of all men ! The acquaintance with 
them was the shibboleth of society, and he who 
could not appreciate or accept an apt quotation 



286 WHO GOES THERE? 

from them, as they came to the delighted pub- 
he, was declared a dull fellow. They were 
intensely sought ; and a gentleman who was an 
habitue of the bookstore of John Wiley, who, at 
New York, rej3ublished them, declared to me that 
when, by the cleverness of Mr. Wiley, he was 
permitted to read them at the counter, it was with 
difficulty he could retain a volume lono^ enoui^h 
to compass the story, such was the eagerness of 
the purchasers. 1 recollect there was a ludicrous 
spasm of fashion about the pronunciation of the 
title, Ivanhoe, — all very plain to us, -?— but then 
public opinion divided into parties of accent on 
the first, second, or third syllable ; while the ex- 
treme in fashion declared for a peculiar twisting 
and Gallicism of each division of the word, so that 
it should sound something like E-vanwe. That 
work obliterated the work of Cervantes, and its 
ideas are yet fibres of the world's language. 

Although, as I now read the two series of books, 
I cannot see how any one could doubt that he who 
wrote the poems wrote the romances ; yet, in the 
day of the " Great Unknown " fiction, the doubt 
was a very serious one, — so much so, that when a 
placard of advertisement of " Scott's New Novel," 
was in some bookseller's window in State Street, 
in Albany, it was thought an unauthorized declara- 
tion. 



WEO GOES THERE 1 287 

One of the best evidences of the power Scott 
held over the public thought, and the deep feeling 
toward him, is in the tablet raised to his memory 
in the wall of the City Hall in Albany, — a place 
as devoid of all romance as the dustiest of the 
didactic could desire ; but there it is, and it does 
honor to the citizens of Albany. Where else in 
the country is there a remembrance, in civic edi- 
fice, of an author, and he a far-off one, and one 
who wrote of peers and princes, of rank and chiv- 
alry, of themes utterly removed from our every- 
day life ? But the spell was on the people. Scott 
had covered the mind of the country with a gold 
that was better than leaf or tinsel. 

There was a public meeting, held at the Man- 
sion House, to testify the public grief at his death. 
Harmanus Bleecker presided, and declared his ad- 
miration of his virtue as of his intellect ; but after- 
w^ards said to me that, if he had known then that 
Sir Walter had absolutely denied the authorship 
of the romances, he doubted if he should have been 
authorized to speak so strongly of his integrity. 
Mr. Bleecker was a high-thoughted man, who 
could not understand any compromise with the 
trnth. I think the justice of the case was, that 
Sir Walter had no right to deny, as he did, but 
nobody had any right to ask him the question. 



288 WBO GOES THERE f 

The last page of these memories comes, — not 
that their theme is exhausted, but that it may not 
be wise to take this place of remembrance, — and 
it is well to test it carefully. How many men have 
I known die, — how many men live on, in avoid- 
ance or neglect of the duty they owe their fellow- 
men, — who possessed and retain the most delightful 
recollections of the great men and great events 
which their wandering over the world, or their 
public service, have made them to know. I am 
sure I have labored with some of them, that they 
should do, as they could so charmingly, what I, 
from materials gathered in a limited circle, have 
endeavored to do in this volume. Sil* i Wright 
once said, if he ever should again begin the world, 
he would give more attention to writing than he 
had done, as more influential than speaking. 

Were that gift of life renewed to me, certainly 
one use of the treasure that I would make, would 
be to make record of wdiat I saw and heard ; and 
thus really see and hear that wonderful drama — 
•which is always acting before us — our own life 
1 should better learn that, with all the shadows of 
its errors, even a common life is a theme worthy 
of an angel's study. 



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